-By Thomas Fisher

The opening photo on Marlon Blackwell's Web site shows a recreational vehicle driving through farm fields, passing a truck trailer parked by the road—a familiar sight along America's highways and yet a strange one as well. What are these metal-clad machines that populate our landscape, and what do they tell us about ourselves and our relationship to place? As an architect in Fayetteville, Ark., and a professor at the University of Arkansas, Marlon Blackwell finds inspiration in the "strangely familiar" quality of the American landscape. "It's an emerging vernacular," he says, "not yet recognized or accepted, containing the fragmented vestiges of the old with the refuse of technology." Blackwell has found a way, through this vernacular, to do top-notch design in "a big-box world," as he puts it, and a way to do so within tight budgets in a "culture not in love with architecture."

Blackwell's buildings reflect the "unholy union of things" that characterizes our contemporary vernacular. America's car culture, for example, comes through in projects like his Srygley office building, whose metal cladding wraps the narrow box-like structure like an automobile's sheet metal, with an angled back end that recalls Cadillac tail fins, a plate glass window across the front like a windshield, and cantilevered walls and roofs that suggest the movement of a vehicle. That expression of motion also emerges in the stairs that Blackwell frequently exposes on the exterior of projects. In his Blessings Golf Clubhouse and in his own house, angled stair-housings convey the vertical movement of people between floors and make these buildings feel energetic and constantly on-the-move.



His interiors have a similar fluid quality. The stores that Blackwell has designed for the women's apparel company Mason's have undulating walls, benches, and display areas that not only draw customers into the shops, but also convey a sense of mobility and mutability fitting for a place selling fashionable clothing. Blackwell's renovation of the Fulbright Building in Fayetteville, Ark., uses glass to similar effect, with full-height glass walls that zigzag along the office corridors, in and out of the existing black-painted columns, as if to echo the slight meandering of people as they walk. The real tour-de-force of the Fulbright Building is the metal "shroud" or "shell" that Blackwell has hung over a conference space to control light and acoustics, looking like the aerodynamic body of an old car or boat visible from the street through glass walls, as if in a display case. In this building, as in so many others, he takes pieces of pop culture and makes them a part of a place.

His buildings also reflect upon the strange relationship Americans have with the land and with nature. While many of us may yearn for the open road and the escape that the car represents, many also yearn to feel rooted in a place and to live close to the land. That productive tension exists in Blackwell's own career. After a couple of years in Arkansas, he was ready to move on, when a colleague told him that he needed to stay if he was to do his best work. Blackwell took that advice and doesn't regret it, knowing that while practicing in Arkansas places him outside of the architectural mainstream, it has also allowed him to get inside a place and "to see beyond the surface of things," a lesson that many globe-trotting designers have yet to learn.

Seeing beyond the surface of things has affected his views of the natural environment. Blackwell has designed a number of projects that, while not overtly "green," take their ideas from the workings of nature. The forms of his "frog" and "dragonfly" houses draw from the way those animals adapt to environments like wetlands or hillsides, elevated above the landscape. Meanwhile, Blackwell's favorite (and smallest) project, the Moore honey house, has a carport and beekeeper's workshop under a roof flared like bee's wings, with a window-wall of angled glass set in deep steel-plate frames that function like a human honeycomb, providing space for storing and displaying the owner's jars of honey. "A link exists between things made and things born," observes Blackwell, "between a nice artifact and a beautiful organism. Architecture is a kind of husbandry that connects the two."

That husbandry idea captures what Blackwell sees as the primary purpose of architecture: to "enrich the everyday environment around us," to "ennoble the lives of citizens," and to "increase our empathy with the world." Blackwell shows that those high aspirations do not require highfalutin architecture. They arise, instead, through "the simple act of building well," he says, in ways "imbued with local specificity and invention." Great architecture has always done that, which raises the question of why, in our contemporary culture, qualities so familiar to past generations have become, strangely, so rare.

Thomas Fisher is a professor and dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. Educated at Cornell University and Case Western Reserve University, he previously served as the editorial director of Progressive Architecture magazine. He has published more than two dozen book chapters, 250 articles, and four books: In the Scheme of Things, Salmela Architect, Lake/Flato Buildings and Landscapes, and Architectural Design and Ethics: Tools for Survival.