By this time next week, Toronto’s 17th Interior Design Show (IDS) will be in full swing at the Metro Convention Centre, sporting its usual panoply of product exhibits, talent showcases and talks by active players in the Canadian and international worlds of architecture and design.
One of the speakers scheduled to present his office’s work next Friday is the American architect Marlon Blackwell. I, for one, was intrigued and a little surprised, pleasantly, to see his name on the list of headliners, given the self-conscious, frankly cosmopolitan ambitions of IDS.
Headquartered in Fayetteville, Ark., where he practises and heads the architecture department of the University of Arkansas, Mr. Blackwell is thought by some observers of the American scene to be merely a southern regionalist. It’s a designation that is both unfair and untrue. While he has certainly sunk deep creative roots in the rocky landscape and human culture of the Ozark mountains, his designs are nurtured (more now than ever) by the high modernist stream that descends from Le Corbusier, through Rem Koolhaas, into the contemporary moment. He likes to say his architecture is what happens when you marry Corb and a bullfrog.
When we spoke by phone last week, I asked Mr. Blackwell what he planned to tell his Toronto audience.
“I’m going to talk about what we do here in what we like to call the Ozarks outback – what we’ve been working on for the last 15 or 20 years: work that is stubbornly local, but is very much connected to a more universal language of architecture. It draws on the aspects of place, the vernacular, certain typologies, then represents them in a strangely familiar way.”
Among his Arkansan sources are “barns and silos and dogtrot houses,” but also “emerging vernaculars such as the semi-truck trailer, campers – parts of a more mobile, technological society. We’re looking at everything from feed mills to chicken houses. Beautiful iconic structures that … stand out from all the flotsam and jetsam that makes up most of the built environment. We are tapping into that, but in a hybrid way – mixing things up.”
Porchdog House is a good recent example of how Marlon Blackwell “mixes things up.”
This 1,500-square-foot, metal-clad residential project, blockily monumental and formally tough, was designed as a model home in east Biloxi, Miss., a coastal town devastated by Hurricane Katrina. New federal rules stipulated that replacement housing built there must be raised at least twelve feet above the street to escape major storm surges coming off the Gulf of Mexico. So what about the porch? “How do you maintain the social interface in the South?” Mr. Blackwell asked. “Which is the porch in an urban condition?”
It was an important question, in view of the fact that the ground-level porch had been a standard feature of Biloxi houses and streetscapes forever. Mr. Blackwell solved the problem simply by raising the boxy body of the house according to the regulations, and installing a broad porch in its shade – one big enough for any number of southern hounds to take an afternoon snooze, or for a family to gather in the cool of the evening and enjoy the casual streetside sociability that the southern porch has traditionally offered. (Porchdog House was commissioned by a single dad with three children, and constructed for about $150 a square foot.)
Not just here, but also in his other work, porches matter to the architect. For example, he is designing a visitors’ centre for an urban park in hot, humid Memphis that will be 8,000 square feet in area and cooled by fans, and that will be surrounded by an 8,000-square-foot porch. “We are looking at ways to expand indoor-outdoor relationships,” Mr. Blackwell said. The centre is not to be “a crystalline box on the land. We’re trying to develop liminal zones around the building – another thing that is born of the region. This might not be useful in a place like Minnesota, but in the South, it becomes quite useful.”
There is something a bit ironic about Mr. Blackwell’s appearance at next week’s IDS, since the most memorable aspect of his projects is surely nothing to do with their interiors, but their exterior imagery. The architect likes to create idiosyncratic forms that cast strong shadows – shapes that are blunt, open-handed, and as honest about themselves as a good truck. His best images are those with the character of a face you don’t easily forget.
“I used to be a cartoonist when I was a kid, all the way up through college,” he explained. “So all the buildings I do are developed in profile. I really think of buildings as visages. Increasingly, I’m trying to distill the form down to very iconic, legible figures. These figures aren’t some kind of decorative, post-modern thing, quoting something. They become useful. When you see the silhouette of a barn, you say, ‘Ooof! That’s powerful stuff!’ It creates an emotional response. That’s what we’re striving for.”