Visiting Professor Blackwell Wins Prestigious National Design Award

May 5, 2016
Eugene McDermott Centennial Visiting Professor Marlon Blackwell has won the 2016 National Design Award for Architecture Design.
Photo by Mark Jackson/CHROMA. Marlon Blackwell is principal of Marlon Blackwell Architects, and is currently the Eugene McDermott Centennial Visiting Professor at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture.

Eugene McDermott Centennial Visiting Professor Marlon Blackwell has won the 2016 National Design Award for Architecture Design. The award is given to an individual or firm for exceptional and exemplary work in public, commercial, or residential architectural design. Click here for a slideshow of Blackwell's projects.

The National Design Awards were conceived by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum to honor lasting achievement in American design. They are bestowed in recognition of excellence, innovation, and enhancement of the quality of life. First launched at the White House in 2000 as an official project of the White House Millennium Council, the annual awards program celebrates design as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of the impact of design through education initiatives.

Marlon Blackwell is one of the nation’s most respected regional modernist architects. His practice takes place primarily in Arkansas and combines vernacular traditions with rigorous formalism. Throughout his body of work, nature has been a persistent inspiration and he strives to create spaces that respond to the physical and cultural eccentricities of a place. Working in the second poorest state in the country, Blackwell’s architecture uses an economy of means for a maximum of meaning and he makes spectacular buildings with very small budgets. His projects have ranged from a Honey House to the University of Arkansas School of Architecture to a spare orthodox church. He was the architect for the Ruth Lilly Visitor Pavilion and the Crystal Bridges Museum Store at the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville. He is the principal at Marlon Blackwell Architects and the head of the Department of Architecture at the University of Arkansas. Blackwell is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Prize, American Institute of Architects National Honor Award, the American Library Association Design Award, and the Best Civic and Community Building Award from the World Architecture Festival.