Project publishes both visual and written work that takes strong positions in order to debate and critically evaluate the field. Each issue includes an insert devoted to visual presentations of contemporary projects while featuring writing in several formats—polemical statements by young architects, extended conversations with significant figures in the field, long-form critical essays, and short readings. It is published by Consolidated Urbanism, Inc., a non-profit that supports critical analysis of architecture and the contemporary city. Their work involves the publication of this journal as well as associated public events and discussions. 

For this edition of our Screen/Print series, we're featuring an interview from Project with Marlon Blackwell, an American architect and professor based out of Fayetteville, Arkansas. As the second poorest state in the country, Arkansas is not the most obvious location to set up an architectural practice, but it actually has a rich modernist history. Edward Durell Stone, Warren Segraves and Fay Jones all called it home. In keeping with this tradition, Blackwell's practice is known for its vernacular modernist aesthetic done on a lean budget, and has received numerous awards including the recent 2016 National Design Award from Cooper Hewitt.

In the following interview, conducted by John Capen Brough and Parsa Khalili over the phone, Blackwell discusses his choice to move to Arkansas and his dislike of the term "critical regionalism". He also gets into the difficulties of balancing teaching and practice, as well as the process of learning how to linger in a place. 

An Interview with Marlon Blackwell

Conducted by John Capen Brough and Parsa Khalili

John Capen Brough: We wanted to start by discussing the fact that you operate as both an educator and a practitioner. How do you balance these two roles?

Well, this question of balance comes up quite often, and I say, “What balance? There is no balance in my life.” I started out, after ten years of practice, going to teach with the hopes of being a liaison between the academy and the profession while also developing a practice. The original goal was one or two projects a year over a career of thirty to thirty-five years, which would amount to a nice body of work. Over time the transition began to happen where smaller projects began to lead to larger projects—more public, more institutional—that demanded more than just a single, sole proprietor in a spare bedroom engaged with every minute detail and aspect of the practice. And so that shift happened where the practice demanded as much, if not more, time than teaching. But I can’t think of teaching without practice, and I can’t think of practice without teaching. I use lessons from both in order to solve challenges in the other.

Every day that you teach you continually have to be very explicit and clear about your positions relative to architecture because you are a facilitator and an educator but you’re a bit of a preacher too. You have to be clear on where you stand on the ideas, and in order to be clear you have to be informed. Students will tolerate a lot, but I’ve found they have very little tolerance for professors who don’t practice what they preach. When I say that, that includes scholarly work and creative research. In other words, there has to be a correlation between the two. What teaching did for me was regulate the kind of work I would take on. Sometimes I would tell a client point blank, “I can’t do this. The expectation at my university is that I operate at a very high level because this is my research.” So for me I saw practice as research—not in the typical academic way but rather in thinking of research as opportunity, as a way to investigate everything from materials to systems to form generation.

So for me I saw practice as research—not in the typical academic way but rather in thinking of research as opportunity, as a way to investigate everything from materials to systems to form generation.

I think the other aspect of teaching is that you’re engaging fifteen students every day with fifteen different ideas. You’re trying to instill in them a certain agency and agility in how they think which in turn requires you to do the same about how you engage these various ideas—ideas that are not necessarily yours. At the same time, ideas come out of that engagement—the different ways something could be done… Before, when I would design, I’d try one or two propositions. But now I’m constantly asking, “What if? How many other ideas are there?” That comes out of the beauty of questions, the lines of inquiry that are so critical to the academy, to research and design. So that’s how teaching helps the practice.

The practice for me relative to teaching helps discipline the teaching, helps me understand realistic expectations about what can be achieved. It also provides an opportunity to share real life situations with students. They benefit from the fact that I am in the trenches—that I am informed, up to date—and that I am practicing what I preach. If students see you holding yourself to high standards, they understand what it means for you to hold them to high standards.

Parsa Khalili: Could you talk about the circumstances of how you transitioned from one pursuit to a combination of the two? Did you always have one foot in both?

I focused primarily on practice for the first ten years of my career. Then after my fifth year of practice, I taught two semesters at the Boston Architecture Center, essentially a night school, where young professionals go after hours to see if they can teach or not—torturing the hell out of students because they have never taught before. But it’s a good deal for young professionals to learn what the challenges of teaching are. I got to the point where I realized that I was talented but there were tons of more talented people out there—this is when I was in Boston. I wasn’t independently wealthy or well-connected, and I didn’t have a degree of a certain pedigree. So I thought, “How am I going to dictate on my terms the kind of work I want to do?” And I came to the conclusion that I was at a point in my life that I might be useful as an educator-practitioner. That’s when I began to make the transition, so I did a post-professional degree at Syracuse University in Florence, Italy and followed it up with a teaching gig at Syracuse in New York. Eventually, I made my way to the University of Arkansas. At the time, teaching was what was primary. Then you get a project here and there, and the emphasis of teaching begins to shift. After about ten years of teaching and practicing, it became pretty clear that they both inform each other. But it also became clear that larger work, more public work, would require a bigger investment of time and a larger staff. These things seem to happen in ten-year chunks so to speak. Now having gone through another ten years of this, practicing and teaching, being director of a school for six years, things have only gotten better. You learn how to do more in the limited time you have. You learn how to surround yourself with good people. I had great staff at the university and here in the practice.

JCB: When I visited you in Fayetteville, we talked about how the people you were meeting at the university, who were coming in from all over the world, were a source of inspiration for you. I’m interested in how that aspect of your involvement with the university parlayed itself into your work.

The university was definitely the doorway into these other worlds. I’m in a relatively remote place, where it’s difficult to go to the world. What I tried to do when I first started here back in 1992 was bring the world to us. That’s why I started making phone calls to get people like Robert Irwin, Peter Zumthor, and Jacques Herzog to come. I was taken by what they were doing and felt like they were ready to break out. These Swiss architects were just at the cusp of international acclaim. I would bring them in and spend three days at a time with them. I felt like it was another post-professional degree because, as I tell my students all the time, “If you’re going to be influenced, be influenced by the best. Hang around the best.” Bob Somol always told me, “If you want to make it in this business, ask yourself who you want to go to dinner with. And then get invited to the table.” That’s what the academy allowed me to do, to sit at the table with some pretty amazing people, designers and thinkers alike. And you learn from them all—if, from nothing else, through osmosis. Being around them, listening to them talk, learning how they think, and watching how they draw and interact…it makes you a very careful observer.

In 1997 and 1998, I had the opportunity to teach with Peter Eisenman. I was kind of a neo-Luddite at the time. I just drew and did my work. I didn’t use computers, read post-structuralist theory, or anything like that. I was kind of a neo-Luddite at the time. I just drew and did my work. I didn’t use computers, read post-structuralist theory, or anything like that. Then the university department head, David Buege, put me with Peter, and suddenly I was reading Deleuze and Guattari on machinic and non-authorial processes and doing crazy stuff that I had never thought about before. I was asked to teach a studio with him and that was an amazing experience, a whole other post-professional degree. And as a part of that experience, I was introduced to all these other people like Sanford Kwinter, Greg Lynn, Alejandro [Zaera-Polo], Karl Chu, and Bob Somol. Other relationships come out of that. There is a whole network that you’re introduced to at the academy that finds its way back to your practice…ways of thinking that can be channeled into and bring a more vital voice to your work.

The first major project that brought international acclaim to my office was a little honey house, in North Carolina, and that grew out of a lecture by Jeffery Kipnis that Peter brought me to. He was talking about monads and self-organizing systems, and I was drawing away. This exposure to ideas begins percolating through your brain when you are working on a project, and then suddenly it starts manifesting itself, not through their voice but through your voice. Then a project comes out of that—the project becomes a catalyst. Colleagues like Sanford [Kwinter] and Nader [Tehrani] then see it and say, “You’re on to something,” and you get this validation. Arkansas is pretty insulated, and so the academy was my outlet to the world.

JCB: This sense of remoteness that you mention is interesting. You’ve been talking about the connections you have forged with the broader architectural community, but it’s important to talk about the opportunities that this remoteness also brings you.

It’s a restorative environment in a way. There is a lot of opportunity to reflect, to work without distraction. Peter [Eisenman] always said that you can make a great school anywhere but it’s the places that schools are at that are tough. What Fayetteville always lacked for him was cultural and media infrastructure. Without these infrastructures though, you turn back toward nature. Occasionally you make the run out to New York City for a week, but you come back to your place. It allows you to get below the surface, to discover the underbelly. The questions that I was beginning to ask were questions that were born out of the place I was in rather than some existential import. So we began concerning ourselves with local form and craft and how we can push that along.

Zumthor, who visited Fayetteville at one point, is from Haldenstein [Switzerland]. As it is an isolated place, it has its own language. It allowed him to focus without distraction. I think that’s really important, and I think that’s why I still stay here now. You get to the point where you do what you do. You’re still informed and well-read and all that, but you’re not a prisoner to all of the mediated stuff that goes on. It’s very stimulating by itself, but for work you need to be in a restorative environment.

PK: I can’t help but feel that the benefits of this isolation are something that you may have in hindsight. When you were first contemplating making a move, what made you take the leap?

I came to the conclusion that I felt pretty good where I was but I didn’t have the patience. I wondered how I was going to get out of the back seat, and I thought that I needed to get out to the middle of the country, to a place where there was a history of good design. A good example exists here in Fayetteville in E. Fay Jones, who proved you could have a small firm with a national presence. I thought, “If he can do it, I can do it. I am just going to do my thing; that could be great.” I mean, God…I needed to have therapy after I got here and started thinking, “What have I done?” I went through all that mental stuff…I figured out that I did actually like my father after all…[Laughter]

But you have to just take the plunge. There was this fellow, Chris Risher, a pretty phenomenal teacher and architect from Jackson, Mississippi who taught at Harvard for quite a while—Mack Scogin had brought him up there. He talked like Faulkner wrote…an amazing presence, and a great guy. He used to talk about the architecture of the ‘stay.’ He said so much of the new architecture—of course this is back in the nineties—was about moving through it. You go through it and don’t want to go through it again. He would say, “I’m interested in an architecture that gets you to linger.” Architects are always moving to another firm or another place, but if you’re constantly moving you don’t get to that point of stasis where you can actually make things that are deeply felt and rich. You don’t develop relationships with people or the land or the place.

At one point, I was on the verge of leaving Arkansas but Chris said, “You need to stay.” I had just co-founded a program in Mexico City at the Casa Luis Barragán. I had that going on, as well as an emerging practice and teaching. Yet, he said, “You’re crazy to leave— you need to stay put.” You just suck it up and say, “This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to build a practice one building at a time…just like building a wall.” Ask a stonemason how you build a wall, and he will say, “You just grab a rock (don’t look) and stack it on the next one and try to fit it in and reach back and do it again, one stone at a time.” Having principles that one can live and build by is paramount. I came to the conclusion that I had to develop principles by which I could direct circumstance as opposed to letting circumstance direct me.So much of the new architecture—of course this is back in the nineties—was about moving through it. You go through it and don’t want to go through it again.

So, it was really understanding what I wanted to get out of it and learning how to build that. In some ways you could say it is hindsight, but I had a plan to come out here and make it. All my friends in New York City and Boston thought I was crazy going out to Arkansas, saying “We’ll never see him again…” I also realized you can get things built quickly out here in the middle. In Boston we had to pay runners to move through the building department to get a permit, which could take a year. So the gestation period of a project was exponential compared to what could be accomplished here. And I didn’t have all these filters—I could go directly to subcontractors and fabricators. They are right here, everything is ten to fifteen minutes away, so I gained two hours a day of productivity just by being here. There are trade-offs culturally, no doubt, but there are things to be gained.

PK: Would you say, for those who are interested in following in your footsteps, that this remoteness today is easier to deal with?

I think so. You have to become willing to become part of the place. Become a citizen in your own way. It requires an investment of time and self, and you have to be disciplined with how you balance teaching and practice.

I was thirty-five when I started this whole thing. I thought, “What do I have to lose?” I got to a point in my life when I moved here that I had already been published in architecture—I had a Record house, my first house—so I had a little bit of confidence. I took that momentum and ran with it. The other thing…I had a dean who promised me commissions if I came to the University of Arkansas. He said, “What would it take to get you here?” And I said, “I want to teach, and I want to start a critical practice because I’m not a traditional scholar.” He said, “If you come here, I can guarantee you work.” When I came, he directed commissions to me. He didn’t serve them up to me, but he gave me contacts and people looking for architects. I have to say I was pretty goal oriented by this time. The way I looked at it, as I mentioned before, is that you could build a legacy on doing one or two projects a year for thirty-five years. That was the motivator.

Then, like I said, having seen someone like Fay Jones here…and the Ozark modernists. Edward Durrell Stone, who grew up here… Warren Seagraves, who was a guy doing Miesian work…and diehard local modernists like Ernie Jacks, who used to work for Ellwood… You realize there is a whole legacy out here already. If you turn around and say, “I’m going to move to ‘Do What’ Mississippi with no academic institutions or economy and make it happen”…I would say that would be pretty tough. Sambo Mockbee did that for a while, but even he had to locate his firm ultimately in Memphis and start teaching at Auburn. If you go around to places like Nebraska, there is Jeff Day who heads the Nebraska program…or Rand Elliot in Oklahoma City, Anne Duval & Roy Decker in Jackson, Mississippi, or some of these other folks. They are connected in some way to institutions, but they also have a practice. But if you’re going to do it, I’d say that you need to find yourself an institution.

Honestly, I didn’t want to do 7-Elevens to pay the bills…so teaching helped avoid that. I made a decision without knowing it, the same decision that Fay Jones and my friend, Glenn Murcutt made—because they both did the same thing. I started my firm the way I wanted to end it. You don’t wake up at fifty and decide you are going to do good work. You start out, you make that decision and you stick with it, hell or high water. And you go from there, and you don’t waiver from that. It’s a tough road but it’s a road that pays dividends.

JCB: One thing you mentioned earlier that I thought was a nice statement was your desire “to make modest things that could be great.” I think it would be good to hear you talk a little bit about this idea of modesty and how it plays into your work.

Well, restraint… Restraint. Some things that are subtle and nuanced in the work… What I was inspired by, or how I came to the conclusion that that was possible, was through the early work of Herzog [& de Meuron] and Zumthor, where there was less reliance on formal gymnastics and more on material and surface, especially the vertical surface. That to me seemed very doable and achievable where I was located at—because formal gymnastics equaled money. You know, these old carpenters around here, they say, “All the money is in the jigs and the jogs.” And looking at the vernacular too around here (the barns and the chicken houses) and the improvised additions—trailer homes that are roofed over and lots of the crazy stuff that you see out in the boonies sometimes…A barn is a powerful thing when it sits in its place. It’s basically made out of one material with one or two details. It has a strong profile, one big move and that’s it. And these are powerful things. I just sort of identified with the singularity of these structures.

Being in a place where there is more space than there is form you observe how simple things can occupy space and resonate in ways much larger than their actual size. Subtle manipulations of surface, transitions—how to turn a corner—all of those are things that can be theorized. These tectonics in my view, or at least what I was trying to rely on, are a more legible way of thinking through your own sensibilities. You’re able to generate things that are at once connected to the place but also strangely operating in some other world, some more universal setting. And so, there is a productive tension with a place that I began to recognize you could make. People respond to that…to what is at once familiar and remote—an architecture of estrangement.

I've seldom had a discussion with a client here about form. Because the form we come up with, they say, “Yeah I can kind of see that.” So what we talk about is what does it do, how is it useful. The same way you would talk more about what a barn does than what it looks like. That sort of stuff came from studying J.B. Jackson’s The Necessity for Ruins, which is a great book… Robert Irwin’s story in Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees…[M. Benedikt’s] For an Architecture of Reality… little insights that began to suggest that this might be a good way to build in this place but still operate within a contemporary discourse.

JCB: There is one thing that we are perhaps a little hesitant to bring up, but it seems relevant to what we have been discussing…

PK: Critical Regionalism…

We got interviewed when we won the Cooper Hewitt [National Design Award], and somebody said, “What is it like being a regional architect?” Ati [Johari Blackwell], my partner, said, “He doesn’t like that…” [Laughter]

Would you say that somebody working in Boston is a mid-Atlantic regionalist? No, you’d never do that. You just say that because we’re not in a city on the East or West Coast. So…is it regional? Yeah. Is it critical? Yes. Is it experimental? Yes, at times. But I don’t think that that is what motivates me. I’m really motivated by how something occupies a place or a space…whether it is understood from a thousand feet away, one hundred feet away, or ten feet away. I think there is a dynamic there that keeps informing you, keeps revealing something to you—that’s what I’m after. That’s what I am interested in. So strong form, sure…why not. I see barns and silos as strong form, very particular form. That’s what we are interested in. But I learn from things like the dog trot or the shotgun house—local typologies. The thing about the Critical Regionalism thing is that it is often naively misinterpreted and seldom transcends the vernacular.

I'm interested in moving architecture away from idealism, utopianism, and easy meanings.PK: It seems like a catchall.

Hey, look at those guys who are working out in Alabama; they must be Critical Regionalists. I’m not really thinking that way. I read everything I could find on Corb. I sat and read through the whole Reiser + Umemoto book, Atlas of Novel Tectonics… I’m looking at everything. How can I channel something that I connect with in these things as a part of what I do but not in a literal way? How does it inform my work? The regionalist tag just gets old.

Do you know the work of Carlos Jiménez? He’s a dear friend, and a wonderful architect. We were in the 40 Under 40 book together in 1995, way back when… He was in the category of “radical,” and I was in the category of “regional.” [Laughter]

And I thought to myself, “How is that possible?” I know why: because he works in a city and I work in Arkansas, which must be an uncomplicated place.

Princeton [Architectural Press] did our monograph, and the original title for it was absurd. They wanted to call it “Marlon Blackwell: The Architect of the Ozarks.” It sounded like [The Life and Times of ] Grizzly Adams. And I said, “There is only one architect of the Ozarks and that is E. Fay Jones.” And the interviewer said, “Who?” At the time, his chapel [Thorncrown] had just been voted the fourth best building of the twentieth century [by the AIA]. And I said, “Have you ever been to the Ozarks?” “Well, no…we were just thinking about the romance of the forest and the hills…” But that’s not what it’s about. They project their provincialism on you. And quite frankly: it just don’t fit. I'm interested in moving architecture away from idealism, utopianism, and easy meanings.

JCB: Before we started our conversation, we pulled out your monograph, and as we flipped through the projects, we started talking about the Keenan Tower House. And Parsa, who is looking at a lot of your work with fresh eyes, commented that it reminded him of Thom Mayne’s work. When you are talking about strong form, I think it is interesting to look at this project in particular because you have created this tower and paired it with vernacular cladding at the top and a more abstract screen of vertical boards at the base.

I remember when I showed the project to Robert Ivy, the former editor of Architectural Record, when I was trying to get it published, and I flipped to the image of this tower. And he jumps out of his seat, and he says, “My God, that looks like John Hejduk grew up and built something.” [Laughter]

And I was like, “Is that a compliment…” At the time, I was teaching with Eisenman, and I wouldn’t dare show this to Peter. But, you know, Greg Lynn was in town one day, and I took him out to see it and he said, “Man, this is great!” So we were getting all of this feedback, but we didn’t know what we were doing. We had certain reasons for making this tower…I’ve always been interested in proto forms, like embryos… If you look at the embryos of insects, animals, or human beings and take them back far enough, they all actually resemble one another…so proto-forms…that’s where some of that came from.

But you don’t want to open up the lid of your head too wide because it is scary to people. I didn’t talk about that stuff with the client, you know. It’s tough to theorize the imagination. Theory tends to be more exclusive; I operate in the realm of dissimilarity, variation, and situation. It’s different. So, the regional thing…I get it, I understand where it comes from. We use it typologically but we see typologies as dynamic, adaptive, evolutionary, and responsive to change environmental, cultural, and social.

PK: I’m really glad that I didn’t ask the question…[Laughter]

We’re dealing with type. A lot of people look at type, and they fixate on it—they see it as something fixed. When types are fixed, it can become more about style: whether it is the New Urbanist style or the pure modernist, Corbusian style—it becomes something stable. I see type as something that is not so stable, at least in how it manifests itself over time.

We just completed a visitor center for Shelby Farms Park [in Memphis] with Field Operations. Our work there is born out of an observation of agricultural and industrial buildings, their material logics, and the dogtrot and porches—typological stuff, but stuff that is formulated and articulated in a very contemporary way. That’s what we’re doing. We’re taking all of this stuff and making a roux. You gotta have a really good roux, a base, for a really great gumbo. So this stuff is the base for what we make when we work. In turn we hope to generate an architecture that demands a close reading.

JCB: One last thing: how do you see your practice evolving going forward?

I think the next thing that we take on is a couple of good developers for housing. We just had a great opportunity with Tishman Speyer that didn’t work out. We’re currently working on a nice project in Indianapolis, the state archives library for the state of Indiana. We’re also working on an innovation lab for a private school in Dallas, and we’re working with Design Workshop, redesigning Calder Plaza in Grand Rapids. So we’re starting to do some more national work, and yet we’re still doing work right in our neighborhood that we’re really excited about. I see us doing more and more public and institutional work across a range of building types and budgets…we would love to do an embassy.Our mission, which we’ve been pretty clear about for a while, is that architecture can happen anywhere, at any scale, at any budget, and for anyone.

Around here two hundred dollars per square foot is our sweet spot. We hardly get people to spend more that that on a building here—most people that is, not all. I think one of the things I wanted to demonstrate ten years ago was that we could scale up, that we could be one of those small firms that can do great houses and also great public work. That doesn’t always work for some very good small firms. I think we’re demonstrating our ability to scale up. And the reason for that is that we have had a commitment to developing language, to really developing syntax for all the work that we do…from the scale of the site to the scale of the hand. Material logics, formal logics, and all that…that’s something I’ve been working on. I see us doing more work, larger work…more urban work would be great. We’re just trying to take it all on. And we still do our pro-bono work once a year.

I think the great thing about operating right now is that we can live in Fayetteville, Arkansas—we can build and teach here—and yet we can have an impact because of technology and all of these great ways to communicate. We can have an impact beyond our town or our state. We feel like we are becoming a really great export commodity for the state of Arkansas! Our mission, which we’ve been pretty clear about for a while, is that architecture can happen anywhere, at any scale, at any budget, and for anyone. This idea of working for the public and for institutions is that it is for anyone…and I mean anyone who wants architecture not just as a user but as a client. I think our designs increase our ability to be resourceful and agile at making great projects that might cost seventy dollars per square foot and great projects that might cost seven hundred dollars per square foot. I think we can do both. The future for me is not about our own growth. I don’t think we’ll get any larger than ten to fifteen people. We just want to grow in terms of what we can do at a larger more public scale.

JCB: You don’t want a Hong Kong satellite office?

We’ve never felt comfortable with that. It’s interesting but I like projects that I can get to…projects I can spend time with and really get involved with. I like clients, and I like to follow up after the project is done. I don’t think we’re interested in being international stars or anything. We’re really about this idea of ‘placeness’; dealing with places and their qualities. We’re just interested in working…well, here…in the broad sense.

Screen/Print is an experiment in translation across media, featuring a close-up digital look at printed architectural writing. Divorcing content from the physical page, the series lends a new perspective to nuanced architectural thought.

For this issue, we featured Pool's first issue, "Table".

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