Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, together with his partner in life and work, Ati Blackwell, AIA, ASID, leads the internationally recognized practice Marlon Blackwell Architects in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Marlon Blackwell will present a lecture at 4:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 6, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the U of A campus as part of the fall 2025 lecture series in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

In this lecture, “Out of Place: Architecture Betwixt and Between,” Blackwell will reflect on his practice’s philosophy and approach, framing its creative work through the enduring lens of the porch, one of several typological elements that are integral to the work.

Emphasizing projects in the public and civic realm, often emerging from outside the established centers of architectural culture, the distinct and original voice of Marlon Blackwell Architects is captured in Radical Practice: The Work of Marlon Blackwell Architects, a monograph published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2022.

The firm’s iconic and award-winning designs span typologies, scales and budgets, merging the universal language of architecture with the particulars of place. The lecture will project an open-endedness, at once generous and provocative, that shapes the practice’s trajectory and its ongoing investigation of what a “radical practice” can be in the contemporary moment.

Marlon Blackwell Architects, Stephen Burks Man Made, D.I.R.T. studio and TEN x TEN comprised the design team for “Porch: An Architecture of Generosity,” the exhibition for the United States Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Celebrating his practice’s key role in the U.S. Pavilion project, Blackwell will use this lecture to highlight the potentials of the porch, understood as both threshold and interface, an environmental solution, a site of sensual pragmatics and a space of community encounter.

The porch embodies a uniquely American architectural gesture: an open invitation to sit, share ideas and dwell. As such, it becomes a powerful framework for architectural exploration, mediating between public and private, landscape and dwelling, individual and collective life. A core principle at the heart of the practice, radical in its fundamental simplicity, is the assertion that the making of buildings and places must remain a constant, authentic focus. This is an architecture of the place, for the place, in the place, and at times, out of place.

The work of Marlon Blackwell Architects has been recognized with significant publication and more than 220 design awards, including the 2016 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture and the 2025 Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize. Working between the universal language of architecture and the particulars of place, the firm has cultivated a studio recognized for its formal clarity, contextual depth and architectural integrity.

In 2020, Marlon was honored with the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects for his enduring impact on the theory and practice of architecture. He’s a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an inductee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Equally respected as an educator, he served as Distinguished Professor and the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas — where he taught for more than 30 years until his retirement this summer. Currently, he is serving as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University for the fall 2025 semester.  

The school is pursuing continuing education credits for this lecture through the American Institute of Architects.

This lecture is free and open to the public. Seating is limited.