Community Design Center Wetlands Project Awarded National Endowment for the Arts Grant

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant to support the creation of a public access master plan for a wetland near downtown Fayetteville.

The $25,000 award is through the NEA's Grants for Arts Projects program in the Design category. The grant will support the creation of a Public Access Master Plan for Fayetteville Riverine Commons at property co-owned by the Watershed Conservation Resource Center and the city of Fayetteville. The Watershed Conservation Resource Center is a watershed-based ecological restoration and education nonprofit organization that is working to restore a 98-acre property that has an extensive riverine and open wetland landscape on a degraded floodplain along the West Fork of the White River near downtown Fayetteville.

This NEA funding came through the first round of Grants for Arts Projects awards for the fiscal year 2021, with grants that range from $10,000 to $100,000 and cover 14 artistic disciplines. A total of 1,073 projects from communities across the United States received grant funding totaling nearly $25 million.

The Public Access Master Plan will combine watershed planning with urban design, bringing together city, ecology, culture and art in reinventing a riverine commons. This public access will facilitate the reconnection of the community with the river and wetland ecology, while cultivating a historic understanding of indigenous cultures' management of these natural features.

The master plan scheme will provide for environmental art, recreation facilities (such as hiking, canoeing, fishing and birdwatching), a transit node in a developing intercity water trail, a river education center, and trail exhibits that memorialize Native American riparian lifeways. The project showcases the integration of watershed management with urban design to achieve resiliency and river literacy in Northwest Arkansas, which is the nation's 22nd fastest-growing region and has a population of about 565,000.

The U of A Community Design Center, directed by Steve Luoni since 2003, is an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. Luoni is also a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies at the university. The center's staff also has written a book about watershed urbanism.

"We are particularly excited by this opportunity to work close to home with new partners tasked with developing a new kind of public realm," Luoni said. "Though not quite a park nor a preserve, the commons combine riparian stewardship with celebration of riverine cultures and placemaking through interpretive outdoor installations, art and infrastructure. The NEA award allows us to envision how we might recombine applied thinking in ecology, design and history to develop a public space rooted in a place across different times."

The Public Access Master Plan development, which includes the schematic design and design development phases, is expected to take about 15 months. Luoni and the Community Design Center staff are collaborating on this project with Sandi Formica, co-founder and executive director of the WCRC, who is an authority on design-build restoration of river, wetland and riparian landscapes and who will define program and co-design the 98-acre site; Matthew Van Epps, co-founder and associate director of the WCRC, who specializes in anthropogenic processes affecting watershed resources, river restoration design and implementation, and will engineer landscape restoration strategies; and George Sabo III, director of the Arkansas Archeological Survey and a prominent author on Arkansas history, who will oversee the development of programmatic content on Native American lifeways and agricultural practices for exhibit on the trail system. Other collaborators include the city of Fayetteville, the State of Arkansas Archeological Museum, and the Northwest Arkansas Council's Regional Arts Service Organization.

In the schematic design portion of the work, the collaborators will look at the development of an intercity water trail and a boat livery on the West Fork of the White River flowing through the site. The new master plan will incorporate a new spur of the nearly 40-mile Razorback Regional Greenway and secondary trails displaying information about Native American land-use practices through the design of outdoor exhibit assemblies. The site will also be a haven for plant species native to the Ozarks region, providing locals the opportunity to reimagine how they landscape their own properties.

"Restoring the 98-acre site has been a longtime dream of the WCRC," Formica said. "Revitalizing the wetlands and floodplain is critical to the health of the West Fork of the White River and Northwest Arkansas region's drinking water source, Beaver Lake. We are excited to work with partners to create engaging opportunities to share this rich, riverine environment with the public, so they can directly experience a healthy ecosystem and learn how Native Americans depended on this precious resource and how our quality of life depends on it today."

The Arkansas Archeological Survey, a unit of the University of Arkansas System, will develop programming content that memorializes Native American settlement patterns and river-based habitat management practices.

"We look forward to collaborating with Native American partners to memorialize the legacy of their ancestors through this exciting new project," Sabo said.

The Community Design Center will partner in the design of interpretive exhibits and information displays, as well as habitat and garden re-creations. The center also will prepare the master plan, coordinate partner input, and design facilities and access infrastructure.

Restored riparian forests, prairie and wetlands will be settings for future independent public art pieces. Renderings of the master plan will help with capital fundraising and grant applications.

Three other Arkansas programs received Grants for Arts Projects funding from the NEA in this first round of awards for the fiscal year 2021. These awards include $25,000 to TheatreSquared in Fayetteville in the Theater category; $30,000 to the Sonny Boy Blues Society (King Biscuit Blues Festival) in Helena in the Music category; and $10,000 to the Oxford American Literary Project (the Oxford American magazine) in Little Rock in the Literary Arts category.

Established by Congress in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts is the independent federal agency whose funding and support give Americans the opportunity to participate in the arts, exercise their imaginations, and develop their creative capacities. Through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector, the Arts Endowment supports arts learning, affirms and celebrates America's rich and diverse cultural heritage, and extends its work to promote equal access to the arts in every community across America. Visit the NEA website for more information. 

Fay Jones School Faculty, Alumni Projects Net 2020 Architect's Newspaper Design Awards

Projects designed by Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design faculty and alumni were recently recognized in the 2020 AN Best of Design Awards, an annual competition sponsored by The Architect's Newspaper.

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center, working with the U of A Resiliency Center and Urban Works, along with Marlon Blackwell Architects, an architecture practice led by U of A professor Marlon Blackwell, won recognition for three projects. A U of A campus project designed by Modus Studio and its collaborators also was recognized.

The AN Best of Design Awards is a premier North American awards program open to design professionals for interiors, buildings, landscape, urbanism and installations in the United States, Mexico and Canada. This year's awards program saw more than 800 entries in 50 categories.

Marlon Blackwell Architects won in the Institutional K-12 category for the Thaden School Bike Barn and also received an Honorable Mention in the Commercial Hospitality category for CO-OP Ramen.

Blackwell is founder and co-principal of his Fayetteville-based design practice. He is a Distinguished Professor and the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture at the U of A. He received the 2020 Gold Medal from The American Institute of Architects and was named the 2020 Southeastern Conference Professor of the Year.

The Bike Barn in Bentonville, sited on a berm along the eastern edge of the Thaden School campus, transforms the vernacular of the region into an athletic facility that houses a multi-use court, bike storage and support facilities. Akin to a barn raising, 12 locally fabricated wood trusses were hoisted into place above dimensional wood columns with steel flitch plates, revealing the profile of a modified gambrel barn carved into the space of the interior.

With the exception of the storage and restroom, the entire space is naturally ventilated through open joint red-painted cypress board siding, vented skylights and a series of roller doors that open up the barn to the surrounding landscape.

CO-OP Ramen is a casual dining restaurant in Bentonville that embraces the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which celebrates the asymmetries and imperfections in rough and natural objects. The building materials are ordinary but made extraordinary through texture, pattern and light, supporting a union of roughness and refinement. 

Two primary elements, plywood and concrete block, were used in the design. The double-sided finish plywood was selected for its variation and inconsistency in grain. Each piece of plywood has black or white painted edges, adding a touch of graphic refinement to the organic roughness of the material. Carefully laid concrete block walls surround the space, softened by a 12-foot-tall living green wall.

The Community Design Center received an Editor's Pick in the Unbuilt-Education category for the Wahiawa Value-Added Agricultural Product Development Center.

The Wahiawa Value-Added Product Development Center in Wahiawa, Hawaii, repurposes an existing downtown warehouse as a food innovation maker space for college students. Projects will focus on the incubation and commercialization of value-added food products through the recycling of nearby agricultural waste streams.

The Community Design Center is an outreach program of the Fay Jones School led by Steve Luoni, a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies. Luoni and his team worked with Urban Works Inc., an architectural firm in Honolulu, Hawaii, and with the U of A Resiliency Center. The Resiliency Center, led by Marty Matlock, executive director, is an interdisciplinary research, education and outreach center hosted by the Fay Jones School, in collaboration with the Sam M. Walton College of Business and the College of Engineering at the university.

The Wahiawa center is part of an island-wide portfolio of cooperative food hubs and facilities being developed by the Hawaii Department of Agriculture to support the development of local food supply chains.

The design reorganizes the big box structure of the existing warehouse into a series of three lofts: a public loft for visitor events and product sales; a production loft for product design, processing and packaging; and an administration loft with classrooms, conference space and an office area. Strategically carved courtyards in combination with new roof monitors introduce natural light and exterior views into an otherwise windowless interior. New cladding of gold-colored metal skins — in solid and perforated layers — provides updated public frontages on Wahiawa's main commercial street.  

The design team for Adohi Hall at the U of A won in the Mixed-Use Residential Category. The residence hall, which opened in fall 2019, was designed by Leers Weinzapfel Associates of Boston, Modus Studio of Fayetteville, Mackey Mitchell Architects of St. Louis and OLIN of Philadelphia. Fay Jones School alumni Chris Baribeau, Josh Siebert and Jason Wright are principals of Modus Studio.

Adohi Hall is a 202,027-square-foot, 708-bed sustainable residence hall and living-learning community at the U of A, as well as the nation's first large-scale mass timber project of its kind. An emphasis on nature resonates throughout the project, with exposed structural wood ceilings and wood columns present throughout the building. A serpentine band of student rooms defines three distinctive courtyard spaces that create a dynamic environment for interactive learning in architecture, design and the arts.

Integrated into the topography of its site, Adohi Hall features a cascading series of outdoor spaces with sinuous pathways intricately woven through existing stands of mature oak trees.

Additionally, another Arkansas project, Railyard Park in Rogers, won in the Unbuilt Landscape category of the awards program. It was designed by Ross Barney Architects and AFHJ Architects. 

Two Housing Projects by Community Design Center Win 2020 American Architecture Awards

Two projects by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and its collaborators were recognized in the 2020 American Architecture Awards, the nation's highest public awards given by a non-commercial, non-trade affiliated, public arts, culture and educational institution. The New Beginnings Homeless Transition Village Prototype and 7Hills Day Center Complex both won American Architecture Awards in the Multi-Family Housing category.

The Community Design Center is a public design outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the U of A. Stephen Luoni, the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies in the Fay Jones School, directs the center, working with a five-person staff.

"Congratulations to professor Luoni and the entire CDC staff on these distinguished awards," said Peter MacKeith, dean of the school. "The center's continued design emphasis on the well-being of Arkansas' citizens, through these evident emphases on community resiliency and housing, underscores the school's advocacy of design for the greater good of society."

Now in its 26th year, the American Architecture Awards program is organized by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies, which jointly present this prestigious annual program for design excellence and for the best and next contributions to innovative contemporary American architecture. More than 130 buildings and urban plans from a shortlist of more than 400 projects received 2020 American Architecture Awards for the best new architecture designed and constructed by American architects and by international architects with offices in the United States.

New Beginnings is a transitional housing village in Fayetteville for individuals experiencing homelessness who have insufficient wages and lack access to affordable housing. The complex is designed as a pop-up camp that is compliant with a provisional city permit that only allows temporary structures, providing individuals with an ecologically sustainable stepping stone back to formal housing.

The 7Hills Day Center Complex is a business-hours refuge for people who are homeless seeking one-stop services, including temporary shelter, counseling, provisioning, meals, personal hygiene, mail delivery, job search, prescription drug and light medical assistance, and social connection, among other forms of care.

"The Community Design Center's work on the local housing ecosystem highlights emergent discussions on the future of housing and community resiliency nationwide. Both awarded projects expand on the 20th-century notion of housing as simply a market product to one where wraparound social services are delivered in tandem with shelter," Luoni said. "While both projects focus on homelessness, they parallel creative housing approaches nationwide encompassing all income groups. Approaches include the rise of cooperative living - for example, co-housing, co-living, pocket neighborhoods, etc. — and the bundling of health services into non-institutional housing for the aging, veterans and other groups of need. We are also seeing new forms of live-work real estate products like "agri-hoods" where commercial urban agriculture is embedded into neighborhood design. The future of housing will be novel, socially and economically vital, affordable, and deeply responsive to fluctuating population needs for those communities who see the opportunities in addressing structural problems of shelter intrinsic to advanced economies."

The New Beginnings design combines individual weatherized sleeping units, a secure perimeter and a 150-foot-long "community porch" for shared services such as cooking, bathing and sanitation facilities. The community porch also provides gathering space and social work offices. The components of the village are designed for disassembly and reuse, avoiding the discard of material in a landfill.

The project was granted a five-year conditional approval by the city of Fayetteville. A formal groundbreaking on the site of a former tent city took place in April 2019, and construction is underway.

Twenty single people experiencing homelessness will be able to live in the village for six-month terms, receiving both shelter and comprehensive social services. The goal is to support them in stabilizing their lives and transitioning to permanent housing.

New Beginnings was commissioned by Serve Northwest Arkansas, a regional group working to address homelessness and poverty through a shelter-first approach. Kevin Fitzpatrick, University Professor and Jones Chair in Community in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, served as client and programing consultant for the project.

Other team members include Steve L. Marshall, of The Marshall Group of NWA (construction management); John Langham, AIA, LEED AP, of WER Architects/Planners (architect of record); Leslie Tabor (landscape architect); Neal Morrison, PE, of Morrison-Shipley Engineers, Inc. (civil engineer); Richard M. Welcher, P.E., of Tatum-Smith Engineers, Inc. (structural engineer); and Omni Engineers (MEP engineer).

The 7Hills Day Center Complex project envisions a new facility for an established care center on South School Avenue in Fayetteville. 7Hills provides multiple services for people who are homeless in Fayetteville, including day services, supportive housing and wrap-around case management for veterans.

The design features two interconnected buildings with shared courtyard spaces and many windows. The operations center wing provides care services and shelter to the approximately 100 individuals who use the center every day, while the staff center wing accommodates work areas for more than 20 care professionals.

The project incorporates best practices in trauma-informed design, an emerging sub-discipline within care facility design. Trauma-informed design emphasizes the role of the built environment in supporting recovery from homelessness and resisting re-traumatization.

The design for the day center revolves around four principles: an ethic of hospitality; a variety of indoor/outdoor and public/private spaces; a space perceived by clients as safe, calming and equitable; and a place incorporating connections to the natural world. Exposure to vegetation, natural light and air can reduce stress, enhance mood and elevate sensory enjoyment.

The two Community Design Center projects will be published with the other award-winning projects in The American Architecture Awards Yearbook, which is scheduled to be published in November by the Metropolitan Arts Press. This is the center's 14th and 15th American Architecture Award.

More information about the 2020 American Architecture Awards can be found on The Chicago Athenaeum website.

Two Projects Led by Fay Jones School Faculty Named Winners in PLAN Awards 2020

wo projects by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and Marlon Blackwell Architects have received top honors in The PLAN Awards 2020, an international design awards program sponsored by The Plan magazine.

The PLAN Awards highlight projects in urban design and planning, landscape architecture, architecture, interior design, product design and transportation engineering. More than 1,000 project entries from more than 460 architecture and design studios from around the world were made across 21 main categories in this year's contest. Winning projects and other honors were determined by a 10-member international jury.

The center's design for the Center for Farm and Food System Entrepreneurship was named the Winner in the Education category for future projects. And the Lamplighter School Innovation Lab, designed by Marlon Blackwell Architects, was named the Winner in the Education category for completed projects. Together, these projects topped 53 shortlisted projects in these Education categories.

Another project by the center, the 7hills Day Center Complex, received a Mentioned in the Health category for future projects.

Marlon Blackwell is founder and co-principal of his Fayetteville-based design practice. He is a Distinguished Professor and the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture at the U of A. He received the 2020 Gold Medal from The American Institute of Architects and was named the 2020 Southeastern Conference Professor of the Year.

As part of his firm's mission, Blackwell said they started focusing more in the past 10 years on educational projects, from primary school to collegiate, with the aim to "really elevate those facilities to the quality of the teaching and curriculums that happen in them, so they are places for inspiration and aspiration."

The Innovation Lab was the flagship structure for several projects Blackwell's firm is doing for the Lamplighter School's campus, which serves students in kindergarten through fourth grade. As an applied learning school that embraces collaboration and flexibility, they needed updated facilities that enrich their culture of learning through doing and making.

"It's one of those projects that is extremely resolute. Everything works. Everything from the forms to the space to the details to the campus setting," Blackwell said. "And that came out of an intense process, where we really paid attention to what the school needed and desired, and then did our best to try to exceed that."

The Community Design Center is an outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. Steve Luoni, who directs the center, is also a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies at the university.

"While our work is focused on finding solutions for complex social issues ranging from homelessness to food security and the development of low-carbon neighborhoods for sprawling low-density environments, we are very pleased that the projects are being recognized for design leadership," Luoni said. "Importantly, the recognition reinforces our project sponsors' standing in securing the political will and resources necessary to implement challenging public-interest work.

"The U of A Division of Agriculture's Center for Farm and Food System Entrepreneurship will enhance farmer certification in a state where the average age of a farmer is 58, while helping to create a larger value-added food economy alongside the state's commodity food supply chains," he said. "We are also quite proud that the 7hills Day Center Complex, which we designed to be a human-centered facility with interior courtyards and extensive porch areas to serve Fayetteville's homeless population, was recognized as a leading care facility. It is one of a handful of such facilities nationally to be shaped by 'trauma-informed' design. This extends the University of Arkansas' leadership in public-interest design and the fight for community resiliency as a critical public good."

In addition to the two Community Design Center projects selected for honors, four additional projects by the center and its collaborators were shortlisted in several categories of the awards program, with three of those projects advancing to become finalists.

The Urban Watershed Framework Plan, designed in collaboration with the U of A Resiliency Center, was a finalist in the Landscape category for future projects. The Wahiawa Value-Added Agricultural Product Development Center, designed by the center and Urban Works Architecture in collaboration with the Resiliency Center, was a finalist in the Production category for future projects. The Circle, designed by the center and Marlon Blackwell Architects, was a finalist in the Urban Planning category for future projects. The center's project, the Watershed Conservation Resource Center, was shortlisted in the Education category for future projects.

Below are more details about the two winning projects designed by the U of A Community Design Center and Marlon Blackwell Architects.

"A New Center for Farm and Food System Entrepreneurship: Fayetteville, AR" is an immersive farmer training program that models new concepts and technologies in farming, as well as a public facility for hosting gatherings that celebrate value-added food products. The center, part of the University of Arkansas' and University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture's farm operations near campus, is the public face of agriculture where farmers and the public meet.

The training complex sits amid working fields and arranges different building types around a metaphoric barnyard. The training loft updates barn technology through the use of a sustainable timber structure engineered from glued laminated timber and cross-laminated timber construction. A reticulated timber structure at the entry porch and public area of the training loft provides a sense of warmth and intimacy within the barnyard, while its opposite edge presents a monumental front to the city, east of the farm.

"A Rich Heritage: The Lamplighter School Innovation Lab" is a modern re-envisioning of a late 1960s design by O'Neil Ford, which was complemented by additions in the 1980s and 1990s designed by Frank Welch. These designs realized the founders' vision for a unique learning environment highlighted by open learning spaces, a close relationship with nature, and a village composition. In 2014, Blackwell's firm furthered the evolution of the campus design, with strategies such as reorganization of the site, renovations of the existing building, and the addition of new structures.

The Innovation Lab is the heart of the master plan clarifying the organization of the campus and connecting the new and existing exterior and interior learning spaces. Programmed with hands-on learning classrooms —  including a woodshop, robotics lab and teaching kitchen — the building suggests a holistic approach to design, systems and learning with a relationship to the natural environment. Filled with light and reaching out to the landscape, the Innovation Lab contributes to the vitality of the existing campus of buildings and spaces, while establishing a 21st century identity.

In the 2019 PLAN Awards competition, one Community Design Center project received top honors, and three others were finalists. That 2019 winning project, Greers Ferry Water Garden, was done in association with Marlon Blackwell Architects and Ecological Design Group.

More details of projects for The PLAN Awards 2020 can be found on The Plan website.

U of A Community Design Center, Resiliency Center Project Wins Green Good Design Award

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center, working with the U of A Resiliency Center and Urban Works, has been awarded a 2020 Green Good Design Award for Green Architecture by the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum for Architecture and Design.

The winning proposal, the Wahiawa Value-Added Product Development Center in Wahiawa, Hawaii, repurposes an existing downtown warehouse as a food innovation maker space for college students. Projects will focus on the incubation and commercialization of value-added food products through the recycling of nearby agricultural waste streams.

"This new maker space entails parallel development of a new curriculum by the University of Hawaii Community Colleges system that combines food science and design," said Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. "The goal is to commercialize production processes and knowledge transfers in the creation of new markets in food and food-grade cosmetics through applied learning and design."

The Community Design Center is an outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the U of A. Luoni is also a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies.

Luoni and his team worked with Urban Works Inc., an architectural firm in Honolulu, Hawaii, and with the U of A Resiliency Center. The Resiliency Center, led by Marty Matlock, executive director, is an interdisciplinary research, education and outreach center hosted by the Fay Jones School, in collaboration with the Sam M. Walton College of Business and the College of Engineering at the university. This is the fourth time the Community Design Center and Resiliency Center have received a Green Good Design Award together, and the fifth such award for the Community Design Center.

The project also was shortlisted for a 2019 World Architecture Festival Award in the Education-Future Project design category.

The Wahiawa center is part of an island-wide portfolio of cooperative food hubs and facilities being developed by the Hawaii Department of Agriculture to support the development of local food supply chains.

"Hawaii imports more than 93 percent of its food despite being the most remote occupied landmass on Earth," Luoni said. "Essentially, our team asked, 'How do we think like an island again?' Resiliency for Hawaiians is tied to the reconstitution of local food chains, along with renewable energy supply and affordable housing."

The design reorganizes the big box structure of the existing warehouse into a series of three lofts: a public loft for visitor events and product sales; a production loft for product design, processing and packaging; and an administration loft with classrooms, conference space and an office area. Strategically carved courtyards in combination with new roof monitors introduce natural light and exterior views into an otherwise windowless interior. New cladding of gold-colored metal skins - in solid and perforated layers - provides updated public frontages on Wahiawa's main commercial street.  

The design complies with recently enacted U.S. Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) regulations, a set of stringent science-based protocols to prevent food contamination in food handling facilities. Production processes will include baking, juicing, fermentation/pickling, distillation for alcoholic beverages, development of food-grade cosmetics and packaging.

The Green Good Design Award aims to bring public appreciation and awareness to global design projects that emphasize sustainability and ecological restoration. Winning designs will be exhibited at venues in Europe, the United States and South America.

Award winners are listed on the Chicago Athenaeum website.