UA’s Community Design Center and Marlon Blackwell win awards

FAYETTEVILLE – Local design projects Fayetteville and Farmington, produced by the Fay Jones School of Architecture faculty and staff have,  been recognized with 2012 American Architecture Awards. A third was awarded in Inidianapolis.

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center, an outreach program of the Fay Jones School, won for the Townscaping an Automobile-Oriented Fabric and Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood designs. Marlon Blackwell Architect also won an award for the Ruth Lilly Visitors Pavilion, located at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The program has become the most significant and most comprehensive distinguished awards program in the United States, reflecting the changing state of global architecture and revealing emerging new design directions by today’s foremost practitioners. The annual program also promotes American architectural design to the public at large.

Townscaping an Automobile-Oriented Fabric is a plan focused on Farmington, a bedroom community for Fayetteville that has a five-lane highway for its main street. The highway-to-boulevard plan looks to make the town more pedestrian-friendly, while creating and strengthening social spaces.

The Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood design pooled five adjacent parcels for housing in one of the more open areas of the Pettaway neighborhood, on property owned by their client, the Downtown Little Rock Community Development Corp. They created a pocket neighborhood, nearly doubling the density by placing nine homes around a shared space. Both of these projects received support from National Endowment for the Arts grants.
Stephen Luoni is Distinguished Professor and director of the Community Design Center, which has won two previous American Architecture Awards in 2009 and 2010.

The Ruth Lilly Visitors Pavilion is part of 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park, which opened in June 2010 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The 3,000-square-foot deck structure is made from ipe wood from Brazil, charred cedar wood from Indiana, steel, acrylic and glass. The ipe wood forms extensive decks; it then folds up to form a wall and folds again to create an extensive shade canopy.

Blackwell is Distinguished Professor and head of the architecture department in the Fay Jones School. He has won one previous American Architecture Award in 2011.