Columns E-News - 2022 3QTR

2022 | Third Quarter Edition

AIA ARKANSAS E-News

FROM THE PRESIDENT

It’s hard to believe that 2022 is almost over and that the new year is just a short time away. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the people that have been working behind the scenes to make AIA AR successful.

First, thank you to the Executive Committee and the AIA Board who made this year a great success. A special thank you goes out to Todd Welch and the convention committee for creating a fantastic convention experience for all of us. Having the convention in Rogers gave us an opportunity to try having an event instead of an opening reception. I think everyone would agree that our event at Top Golf was a huge success and a great kickoff to an incredible convention. Our speaker chairs provided us with a great variety of perspectives and once again the design award submissions were outstanding.

I want to encourage all AIA members to get involved in the organization. We have numerous committees that have spaces to be filled. Please take time and consider joining. Plans are already underway for our 2023 convention and our convention chair will be Chris East. Please reach out to Chris and join one of the many convention committees.

I hope everyone has a happy holiday season and that 2023 is a great year.

Craig Boone, AIA

2022 AIA Arkansas President

2022 DESIGN AWARD & CHAPTER AWARD WINNERS

AIA Arkansas presented its Design Awards at the State Convention. The Design Awards program honors works of distinction of AIA Arkansas members and draws public attention to examples of outstanding architecture. Click here to view the 2022 Design Awards Publication

The honorees are:

Honor Awards

Bank OZK Headquarters | Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects

Coler Mountain Bike Preserve | Modus Studio

Co-op Ramen | Marlon Blackwell Architects

Osage Park Pavilion | Modus Studio

Shaw Residence | Marlon Blackwell Architects

Merit Awards

1424 SOMA | AMR Architects, Inc.

House on the Point | John Starnes, Architect

Muse Bowling Green | Modus Studio

Valley Springs High School | Modus Studio

Citation Award

FAA Air Traffic Control Tower | Cromwell Architects Engineers, Inc.

Members’ Choice Award

Pine Bluff Main Library | Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects

People’s Choice Award

Arkansas Heart Hospital Encore Medical Center | WDD Architects

Details on the winning projects and more information on the chapter award winners are included in our publication that was a supplement to Arkansas Money & Politics magazine. You can view it here.

Chapter Award Winners

Award of Merit

David Woolly | Alma School District

Emerging Professionals/Young Architects Award

Katherine Lashley, AIA | Marlon Blackwell Architects

Diversity Award

Women’s Foundation of Arkansas

Michael Lejong Leadership Award

Michael L. Lejong, AIA

POINTS OF INTEREST

John Ed and Isabel Anthony Make

New Gift for Center's Fabrication Space

University of Arkansas alumnus John Ed Anthony and his wife, Isabel, are contributing $2.5 million to support the future naming of a fabrication space within the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation in honor of Peter MacKeith, dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design since 2014. This gift supports the center by providing for the future naming of a 9,000-square-foot maker space the Peter Brabson MacKeith II Fabrication Workshop and Laboratory. This will be the center’s largest interior space, occupying most of the ground floor, and it will open out to the fabrication yard.

The majority of the support for this new design research facility at the university was provided by private funds. In 2018, the Anthonys made the lead $7.5 million gift for the establishment of the center, which will have a primary focus on design innovation in timber and wood. The Anthony Timberlands Center will serve as home to the Fay Jones School’s graduate program in timber and wood and as an epicenter for its multiple timber and wood initiatives. It will house the school’s existing design-build program and an expanded digital fabrication laboratory. The school is a leading advocate for innovation in timber and wood design.

This fabrication shop will be the heart of the building, as the largest and most active space. It will encompass a large central bay, with a metal workshop, seminar room and small digital lab nearby, as well as a dedicated space for a large CNC router. These spaces will be served by an overhead crane that runs on rails from the inside to the outside to move large equipment and assemblies in and out of the building.

Anthony said that soon after MacKeith arrived in Arkansas more than eight years ago, MacKeith immediately saw potential for the state’s forests. The state is nearly 57 percent forested, with almost 12 billion trees of diverse species growing on nearly 19 million acres. MacKeith introduced Anthony, who is founder and chairman of Anthony Timberlands, Inc., to the ways that mass timber products are being used in European construction in other parts of the world, including Finland, where MacKeith lived and worked for 10 years after initially going there as a Fulbright Scholar. “He introduced not only me, but also the entire Arkansas forest products community, to concepts that were occurring all across the world,” Anthony said. “He did this almost single handedly. He formed committees; he made speeches; he incorporated his zeal into putting together groups of people to hear about these innovations that had not been introduced in America.”

Community Design Center Project

Wins Special Projects Plan Award

A U of A Community Design Center project has won in The Plan Award 2022, an international design awards program recognizing excellence in architecture, interior design and urban planning. "Cultural Mappings of Cherokee Village, Arkansas" won the Special Projects category. Sponsored by a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Our Town grant and the City of Cherokee Village, these mappings support a separate master plan commissioned by the 23-square-mile rural planned community developed in 1955 in North Central Arkansas.

Design for the project was led by the U of A Community Design Center, an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the university. Steve Luoni, distinguished professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies, is the director of the center.

"Surprisingly, mapping revealed a far more diverse and complicated set of underlying influences than is evident in Cherokee Village's current environment," Luoni said. "These influences are helping us as urban designers to shape new development possibilities for a cultural landscape where decline has followed the passing of its first generation of property owners over 40 years ago. New insights into Cherokee Village's past gained from cultural mapping — like, there were no Cherokee in Cherokee Village — put designers in a better position to ask: What do we do with complex cultural issues? The mapping led us to focus on new kinds of hospitality landscapes as a planning approach to engage a wider range of development possibilities in the village."

Blackwell, Fay Jones School Participate in Rome Festival

The Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design and the Rome Center in the Graduate School and International Education at the University of Arkansas participated in the prestigious Festival of Architecture earlier this year in Rome. The school and center were involved in the festival in several capacities, most notably with a showcase of "A South Forty," an exhibition coordinated by the Fay Jones School that features contemporary architecture and design in the South. The exhibit was displayed in the Acquario Romano, the headquarters of the Association of Architects of Rome. The exhibit focuses on place-based design, attentive to the necessities of climate, materials, labor and purpose, but also attentive to overlooked or undervalued typologies, constituencies and locales. The exhibit was also on display during the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy. This fall it has been installed in Vol Walker Hall on the U of A campus.

Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, distinguished professor and the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture, delivered a keynote lecture and presentation as part of the festival, and U of A architecture students participated in a weeklong urban design workshop, where they worked with local students on different areas within Rome. The students, comprising teams of American students as well as local students and young professionals, worked on four different projects inside the Ostiense neighborhood of Rome. The results were presented during the closing ceremony of the Festival of Architecture in front of about 100 citizens and local authorities, including the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri. "It was an honor to celebrate architecture with our students, citizens and fellow Roman architects in the Eternal City," Blackwell said. "It was especially meaningful to share our work with the audience in person and online in the historic elliptical hall at the magnificent Acquario Romano."

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