Stephen Luoni, director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center (UACDC), holds the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies and is Distinguished Professor of Architecture at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

Luoni will present a lecture at 12 p.m. Monday, Oct. 27, 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 his lecture, “American Porch Life: Social Worlds Beyond the Household,” Luoni will explore the porch as a deeply civilizing force in the development of American cities and institutions. Rather than simply seeing the porch as an element added to a house, Luoni suggests that it is more useful to consider its liminality and mutability in grasping the porch’s true transformational social agency.

A “floating signifier” that absorbs more meaning than it emits (like flags and race), the porch intertwined new kinds of institutional and public formations. The porch was not simply a household refuge but produced uniquely American forms of urbanism. Indeed, the porch was less a phenomenon of stability, and more one of movement and nomadism in settling the continental United States during the era of the Republic.

Through various mutations associated with the porch’s own rescaling, the porch animated new settlement processes across the country. The porch was an agent in monumentalization, urbanization, medicalization, Western frontiering and placemaking. The porch galvanized new notions of hospitality and spirituality, convening and vacationing, migration, health, even the electing of presidents.

The porch offers a framework for reimagining future social and civic life. Ironically, the U.S. enjoyed its highest rate of upward mobility and connectedness when its residents were the most active in moving from one place to another, during which the porch reached its peak in popularity. Could the porch help us confront the mobility recession the U.S. has experienced over the last quarter century?

The UACDC is an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design and is one of a few university-based teaching offices in the United States dedicated to delivering urban design work. Luoni’s work at the UACDC specializes in interdisciplinary public-interest design combining ecological, urban and architectural design.

The UACDC has developed nine place-making platforms to shape civic design and public policy, including work in housing-neighborhood complexes, agricultural urbanism, transit-oriented development, arboreal urbanism, context-sensitive street design, watershed urbanism, low impact development, sprawl repair and cultural mapping. 

While the center’s projects are primarily located in Arkansas, the UACDC has conducted planning and urban design projects for clients in Hawaii, Texas, South Dakota, Rwanda and Cairo. Under Luoni’s direction since 2003, the UACDC’s work has won more than 200 awards for urban design, research and education, including Progressive Architecture Awards, American Institute of Architects Honors Awards for Regional and Urban Design, Charter Awards from the Congress for the New Urbanism, American Society of Landscape Architecture Awards, Environmental Design Research Association Awards, American Architecture Awards, The PLAN Awards, and the international LafargeHolcim Awards.

Luoni authored the center’s books: Houses for Aging Socially, Conway Urban Watershed Framework Plan, and Low Impact Development: a design manual for urban areas — which has been translated into Chinese. His work has been published in Architectural Record, Landscape Architecture, Progressive Architecture, Architect, Places, and in international journals.

Luoni was named a 2012 United States Artists Ford Fellow. In 2015, he hosted the Mayors’ Institute on City Design regional session and periodically serves as an MICD resource team member. Luoni has a BS in Architecture from The Ohio State University and a Master of Architecture from Yale University.

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.