Marlon Blackwell Architect was recognized for their work on three architectural projects. Blackwell is Head of the Department of Architecture. The firm’s design  for the Cottages at Fallingwater won a Grand Award in the 19th annual Custom Home Design Awards, in the On the Boards category. The design was for cottages to house visitors and scholars participating in education programs at Fallingwater, the famous home near Mill Run, Pa., designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Blackwell’s firm was one of six architectural firms chosen to submit a design last year for the juried Architectural Design Competition of Ideas, organized by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which preserves and maintains Fallingwater.

Blackwell’s Porchdog House was chosen as a finalist for the AZ Awards, an inaugural international design competition sponsored by Azure magazine. The home in East Biloxi, Miss., was created for Biloxi Model Homes, a program for affordable prototype houses designed for the Architecture for Humanity Model Home Program, in response to Hurricane Katrina. The jury reviewed 600 entries submitted from 25 countries and narrowed those down to 52 finalists in 14 categories. Categories are in the areas of design, architecture, interiors, concepts, student work and a jury-created special category. Blackwell’s design was one of six finalists chosen from 80 submissions in the residential architecture category.

The Porchdog House was also included in the May 2011 issue of Architect magazine for the AIA Voices feature. The article is told from the perspective of homeowner Richard Tyler, 51, a single father of three.

Blackwell’s Ruth Lilly Visitors Pavilion, located in the 100 Acres Art and Nature Park at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, was featured in the May issue of Architectural Record and online as a Building Types Study of parks and public spaces.

Korydon Smith, Assoc. Professor, returned from his off campus duty assignment, during which he taught a graduate-level architectural design studio and continued doing research at the University at Buffalo. The graduate program in architecture has four distinct research groups. Faculty and students select one of these four tracks in which to study. Smith taught in the “Inclusive Design” research group.

He worked with Beth Tauke, Professor in the architecture program at Buffalo, to develop a book proposal regarding “Diversity and Design,” which discusses the reciprocal relationship between various design disciplines (media, product, architectural, urban design, etc.) and various aspects of social diversity (race, ethnicity, religion, age, gender, sexuality, economics, etc.). In his words, “How does design affect society; how does a diverse society affect design?”

Smith was based at the IDEA Center (Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access) and worked with them on their ongoing research projects. The IDEA Center is a research center within the UB School of Architecture and Planning.

Smith also spent time completing the manuscript for the architectural theory book he has been working on for New York/London publisher, Routledge. The book is due to be published in 2012.

Pia Sarpaneva, Clin. Asst. Professor, participated in the second International Congress of Architecture titled “The Human Scale in Architecture” in Mérida, Yucatán. Marista University School of Architecture and Design organized the January 2011 event. Carlos Jimenez (USA/Costa Rica), Augusto Quijano (Mexico) and Glenn Murcutt (Australia) discussed their recent work. The three day conference gathered a nightly audience of more than 700 architects and students.

The conference was preceded by a workshop in History of Modern Architecture “Glenn Murcutt: Architecture of Silence” for 30 students from UNAM/Mexico City and Marista Universities. Student team studied and analyzed ten of Murcutt’s houses. The two week workshop concluded in a public review directed by three architects from Mexico City, Humberto Ricalde, Yvonne Labiaga and Fernando Ituarte, and Pia Sarpaneva from the Fay Jones School of Architecture

Lynn Fitzpatrick, Clin. Asst. Professor, was one of three jurors on the 2011 BE Student Design Competition and the 2011 BE Educator of the Year award jury.  Jurors are selected by Bentley® and represented architecture and engineering education and practice. The annual design competition “gives students an opportunity to explore the crucial and rewarding work of designing, building, operating, and sustaining the world’s infrastructure. At the same time, it encourages them to pursue a course of study that emphasizes math and the sciences, which are fundamental to every infrastructure discipline.” (Bentley®) 

The competition drew international entrants in both Student and Educator categories and included high school, two and four year colleges, and graduate level work. Bentley plans to announce the student winners at the students’ institution and the Educator of the Year at its annual Be Inspired: Thought Leadership in Infrastructure event in Amsterdam (November 2011.)

School News

Joey Weishaar wasn’t necessarily trying to win when he and everyone else in his spring Design 6 studio entered the 2011 Lyceum Fellowship Competition, a fellowship that allows architecture students to travel. About 40 Fay Jones School of Architecture students turned in projects the day before Spring Break.

According to its website, the Lyceum Fellowship was established in 1985 “to advance the development of the next generation of talent by creating a vehicle for stimulating perceptive reasoning and inspiring creative thought in our field. Through a unique structure of design competition and prize winning travel grants it seeks to establish a dialogue through design among selected schools of architecture.” A design competition has been conducted annually since 1986.

Only 15 schools are invited to participate, and the University of Arkansas has participated since 2008. Weishaar, a third-year architecture student from Fayetteville, is the second student from this university to win a prize. (Ryan Wilmes won a Merit award in 2008.) Weishaar’s design won second place from about 250 total projects submitted in this year’s competition. The second-place Lyceum fellowship comes with $7,500 for travel.

Design 6 studio mentors were Santiago Perez, Chuck Rotolo and Russell Rudzinski.

Weishaar’s winning drawings and a model are on display through May 16 in the Long Gallery on the first floor of Vol Walker Hall. Gallery hours are from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Many constraints were given by the competition’s project description, which included the program and site: a rest area in northwest Utah, west of Salt Lake City.

Weishaar and other students were given a different program on the same site in their fall semester studio, just to get them thinking about desert architecture. Then, this semester, they focused on large-scale operations that fit in the climate and pure expanse of the region. Students also researched land art installations by Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria and others to see how they dealt with this area type.

Even with that basis, it took Weishaar a while to formulate his design. “There’s nothing on this site that gives it any sort of organization or scale,” Weishaar said. Working under assistant professor Perez, Weishaar established early on that he wanted to emphasize the site’s flatness, particularly in the way in which objects above the horizon were expressed.

He did a study early on that he didn’t think would have anything to do with the later product. He made tiny cardboard flaps on the model and shone light on them from different angles, observing the length of a shadow cast by a flap raised just a few millimeters.

He eventually took that strategy and really elongated it. It’s a core concept to the final project.

One of the most important tools for understanding the intent and scale of the project was a physical model, required by Perez as a primary analytical tool. Perez, who is the school’s 21st Century Chair in Integrated Practice, champions the intersection of traditional design tools, such as physical models, with complementary studies using advanced digital modeling and visualization.

In Weishaar’s design for a rest area at the intersection of the Great Salt Lake Desert and Interstate 80, one end of the structure starts at ground level and eventually rises, over a distance of 960 feet, to a 19-foot height. That’s a length of more than three football fields.

But the problem that took him time to overcome, and actually caused him to discard this design solution several times, was the extreme length. No one would want to walk that far in one building.

Yet, he kept coming back to the design and finally devised a solution through how the space was used. He only designated 250 feet of the space with programming — a rest area with a café, motel and restrooms. The remainder of the space is filled with dirt from construction infill.

Movement within occurs through walking, mostly through the use of ramps. Visitors enter in the middle, where they’re only 125 feet from either extreme of the interior space. If they want to walk the entire 960-foot length of the structure, they can walk alongside it or ascend the gradually sloped roof. The structure serves as an overlook to the expanse of this dry region, which has no vegetation and lots of sky. The area experiences some snow, little rain and seasonal flooding, so the important functions of the building sit above ground level, where they can be accessed year-round.

Weishaar has long approached design by eliminating pieces from a design until the resulting design solves more than one problem. With this project, he added an extra outer wall to the side that contains the motel room doors — so it serves as a barrier from the highway, hides the rooms from the road and provides shade for people walking to their rooms. That was also visually pleasing, because it allowed him to bring the outer wall up to the roofline to form a handrail. It also provided a space in which to tuck away a stairway.

As Weishaar prepared his design, he was somewhat excited about the possibility of travel. However, the stress of completing the design soon overshadowed that excitement.

Also, he wasn’t completely confident with his entry. The design is what he wanted, but he struggled to represent that design concept with depictions in drawings. He couldn’t mail judges the 8-foot-long, one-sixteenth scale model — which best shows the design — but he did send photographs.

“So much was at stake on those six pages. I could have easily taken 20 pages,” he said of his portfolio. “It forced a lot of editing.”

Though he’d put in a lot of time and work, he wasn’t emotionally set on winning. So, when he proposed his travel plans — a trip from the northern tip of North America to the bottom of South America — he didn’t think too much about logistics.

That proposal is pretty wild for him, exactly the kind of thing he’d dream up if he didn’t expect to win. He wrote the proposal on deadline, as happens in college, about 1 a.m. the day it was due, while finishing the competition packet. He’d designed a long, skinny building, so he dreamed up a long, skinny travel route.

When he got the call at home on a Sunday, the last day of Spring Break, he was initially thrilled about the second-place win. Then, he realized he had to tell his parents, who knew only vague details, that he’d proposed a trip from Alaska to Chile.

Weishaar doesn’t have $12,000 and six months, which would have been the case for winning first place. He has $7,500 and three months, so he’s going in summer 2012 and is trying to recruit friends to accompany him.

First, though, he’ll go to Mexico this summer for one of the school’s study abroad trips, which will help prepare him for the other trek by improving his Spanish and his on-site sketching skills.