Marlon Blackwell
(via marlonblackwell.com)
Marlon Blackwell’s Fayetteville-based firm recently became the first architectural firm in the South to receive the No.1 ranking in design in Architect Magazine’s annual national “Architect 50” honors. This came months after Marlon Blackwell Architects had won the 2016 National Design Award from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. These achievements propel him closer to a stratosphere reached by his former mentor and friend, E. Fay Jones, who won the American Institute of Architects’ highest honor in 1990.
Yet, had Mr. Blackwell not broken from the business tenets of Jones, he might never have seen this acclaim.
Throughout the later decades of the 20th century, Mr. Jones had built an internationally celebrated career through buildings designed with a streamlined aesthetic that meshed with the Arkansas forests in which they were often built.
Mr. Jones’ buildings do not impose on nature. Instead, they flow with it. And when it came to marketing, the great architect and longtime Fayetteville resident was similarly yielding. His firm didn’t advertise, and instead of seeking work, took only those projects that came to it, Mr. Blackwell recalled.
For the first eight years of his staffed firm, through 2008, Mr. Blackwell tried to emulate Mr. Jones’ approach. “It was all, ‘If you want us, come get us,’” he recalled. Then the recession hit. “When the phone stops ringing, and your firm is going down the toilet, you think, ‘OK, I better change what I’m doing.’”
The economic downturn changed his firm’s attitude toward marketing, Mr. Blackwell said. “It’s like architects knew who we were, but clients didn’t. We felt like we needed to put ourselves out there more.”
So he and Meryati Johari-Blackwell, his wife and partner, took out a loan to hire a graphic design firm and launch a rebranding effort. They hired a business consultant and pursued larger-scale, “more institutional, more public” work, sometimes partnering with other architecture firms. While Marlon Blackwell Architects has never advertised, it began submitting responses to Requests for Quotes and Requests for Proposal, solicitations for multiple bids made by large organizations.
Fayetteville High School by Tim Hursley
So far, the firm of 10 full-time staff has won three of 35 RFQ and RFP bids, Mr. Blackwell said. That’s in line with the 10 percent success he’s heard is normal. The dividends of this approach are shown in the array of recent projects that played a large role in the Architect Magazine award selection. Public funding backed some of them:
- Blessings Golf Club Indoor Practice Facility in Johnson, Arkansas
- Shelby Farms Park Visitor Center in Memphis
- Fayetteville High School
- Fayetteville Montessori Primary School
- Harvey Pediatrics clinic in Rogers, Arkansas
The goal, Mr.Blackwell says, has been to project an image of a “a national firm that happens to be local instead of a local firm that happens to be national.”
His company is only one of many elite firms in the mid-South historically overlooked when it comes to national celebration, Mr. Blackwell says. “It helps more with credibility. It helps put a focus on design of not only what we’re doing but what other good firms in the state and region are doing. I think the benefit (of the recognition) comes from being able to say ‘Hey, we can compete. We don’t have to be in New York to compete.’”
Blessings Golf Club Indoor Practice Facility
by Tim Hursley
Mr. Blackwell hopes his firm’s increased cachet will benefit the University of Arkansas, where he holds the title of E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture after previously helming the architecture department. “It’s important for the university, which is trying to build a national audience.”
It was the university that brought Blackwell to Arkansas in the first place. After earning his master’s in Italy through Syracuse University, he began teaching at the UA in 1992. There he met E. Fay Jones, who had been the first dean of the UA’s architecture school.
The ensuing friendship lasted through Jones’ death in 2004. Blackwell became department head in 2009, and his firm soon joined with Little Rock-based Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects in designing a new building for the school.
The new home for the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design opened in 2013 to much acclaim. Of the design, Mr.Blackwell told Architectural Record: “The new and the old start to infect each other… Rather than resolving the two, we wanted the building to resonate, to vibrate like a tuning fork.”
