Community Design Center Housing Project Wins 2021 American Architecture Award

A U of A Community Design Center project, "Markham Square Housing District," was recently recognized in the 2021 American Architecture Awards, the nation's highest public awards given by a non-commercial, non-trade affiliated, public arts, culture and educational institution. The project received an American Architecture Award 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, who directs the center, is a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies in the Fay Jones School.

Now in its 27th 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 120 buildings and urban plans were recognized in one of 23 categories, celebrating the best new architecture designed and constructed by American architects and by international architects with offices in the United States.

The "Markham Square Housing District" project is a downtown regeneration proposal for an industrial brownfields site, a former scrap metal yard four blocks north of Conway's main commercial street, re-imagined as a new square surrounded by a mixed-use residential district. The vision for this new square features "wilded," or natural, landscapes that will help manage stormwater runoff and control flooding. It also proposes multifamily housing with distinct frontages — including two-story screened porches, balconies, terraces, patios and courtyards — that line the edge of "green" streets incorporating stormwater treatment landscapes.

The housing types consist of affordable walk-up residential multifamily typologies — rowhouses, bungalows, triplexes, courtyard housing and townhouses — that have not been built since the dominance of 1950s suburban policy. These housing typologies, also called missing middle housing, are compatible with single-family housing. They are affordable types (between 900 and 2,100 square feet) that are key to revitalizing small and mid-sized downtowns without the population dislocations that accompany gentrification.

The Markham Square proposal connects street and square as a continuous civic space, with a design that combines pedestrian-friendly "slow streets" with the square's plazas that showcase public art. The goal is to create an iconic downtown gathering place while introducing downtown housing options for which there is demand but no supply. Markham Square could become a choice downtown neighborhood for an underserved market desiring downtown residential living in Central Arkansas.

"Like pre-World War II neighborhoods characterized by high levels of informality, neighborhood services and social capital, housing that serves future populations well will have to be conceived at the level of the neighborhood rather than the individual project," Luoni said. "We are grateful that the American Architecture Awards recognized the same beauty we see in getting social, ecological and aesthetic systems to work harmoniously toward shaping ordinary places."

The "Markham Square Housing District" project was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts under its Art Works program and the city of Conway. It was a collaboration among the Community Design Center staff, the Department of Architecture students, Conway's planning and transportation departments, citywide stakeholders and the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission.

The design team includes Luoni, Claude M. Terral III, Adriana Ramos-Hinojos, Tarun Kumar Potluri and Kacper Lastowiecki, all with the Community Design Center, as well as Fay Jones School student interns Isabelle Troutman, Jala Jones, Molly Dillard, Bryan Murren, Mitchell Pickering, Urbano Soto, Bethany Stanford, Dayton Thurn and Garrison Weaver.

In addition, Adohi Hall, completed in 2019 on the U of A campus, received an American Architecture Award in the Schools and Universities category. Adohi Hall is a 202,027-square-foot sustainable residence hall and living-learning community, as well as the nation's first large-scale mass timber project of its kind. The innovative project was conceived and designed by a design collective led by Leers Weinzapfel Associates of Boston, Modus Studio of Fayetteville, Mackey Mitchell Architects of St. Louis and OLIN of Philadelphia. Nabholz Corporation of Rogers was the general contractor.

All award-winning projects will be featured in the American Architecture Awards Yearbook, to be published by the Metropolitan Arts Press. This is the Community Design Center's 16th American Architecture Award.

More information about the 2021 American Architecture Awards can be found on The Chicago Athenaeum website. 

Design Publications Recognize Two U of A Community Design Center Projects

Two University of Arkansas Community Design Center projects that rethink housing and other building types have garnered recent accolades from The Plan and Fast Company magazines.

"Wood City: Timberizing the Standard Real Estate Product Types" received an Honorable Mention in the Cities category in Fast Company's 2021 Innovation by Design Awards. It also won the Special Projects Future category in The Plan Award 2021, an international design awards program in architecture and urbanism sponsored by The Plan magazine. "Markham Square Housing District" won the Housing Future category in The Plan Award program.

"Wood City" was designed by the U of A Community Design Center, working in collaboration with the U of A Resiliency Center, and was sponsored by the Weyerhaeuser Giving Fund. Some of the work was done during a fall 2020 studio at the Community Design Center, led by the center's director, Stephen Luoni.

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

"The Wood City studio is a great example of how design and creativity can help transform what is possible in our built environment," said Ara Erickson, vice president of corporate sustainability at Weyerhaeuser. "I am looking forward to the day when we can all look up and see cell towers built from wood and buy our groceries surrounded by the beauty and warmth of wood."

"The national recognition of the UACDC's 'Wood City' project underscores the value of the Fay Jones School's design-centered public service mission," said Peter MacKeith, dean of the school. "Our design work specifically on behalf of Arkansas' forests, timber and wood products industries is of demonstrable state and national value, and we are pleased to partner with Weyerhaeuser in this ongoing initiative."

"Wood City" takes 19 standard real estate products — which make up about 75 percent of the built environment — and looks at a new way of designing and building them to steer development toward a low-carbon future. These are building sectors that largely shape American cities but are ignored by high-culture design — including fast-food restaurants, big-box grocers, single-family homes, self-storage facilities, hotels and neighborhood shopping centers. 

The project proposes making these common building typologies from wood — the only building construction system that sequesters carbon and can be engineered to be "energy positive." The project turns to mass timber engineering — glulam and cross-laminated timber (CLT) technologies — as an alternative to more traditional materials of concrete, steel and light-framed wood construction. Because they store carbon, mass timber buildings become a form of climate protection.

Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is one type of mass timber. A CLT panel is made using odd-numbered layers of stacked lumber, with the wood grain running in alternating directions. Those layers are then bonded with structural adhesives and pressed to form a solid, straight, rectangular panel that can serve as both structure and the finished surface in low-rise buildings.

Another type of mass timber is glulam (glue-laminated), whose pieces are bonded together with the wood grain of the layers running parallel rather than perpendicular, as CLT panels do.

In addition to addressing climate issues, mass timber products are fast and easy to install and generate almost no waste on the construction site.

Using cross-laminated timber (CLT) prefabrication and glulam technology, "Wood City" develops sustainable pattern languages for these structure types that are the building blocks of low-density metropolitan sprawl in the United States. While patterns are aligned with new development trends redefining each product category, each pattern can link up using grammar-like rules to create new possibilities for placemaking.

The "Wood City" project was designed by Stephen Luoni, Assoc. AIA, and Claude M. Terral III, AIA, Tarun Kumar Potluri, Kacper Lastowiecki and Joshua Levy. Fay Jones School students in the "Wood City" studio include Jacob Caylon, Alford Keturah Bethel, Mary Grace Corrao, Matthew A. Scott and Wenjie Zhu.

The other Plan Award winner, "Markham Square Housing District," was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts under its Art Works program and the City of Conway. This project took the site of a former scrap metal yard four blocks north of Conway's main commercial street and re-imagined it as a new square surrounded by a mixed-use residential district. The vision for this new square features "wilded," or natural, landscapes that will help manage stormwater runoff and control flooding. It also proposes multifamily housing with distinct frontages — including two-story screened porches, balconies, terraces, patios and courtyards — that line the edge of "green" streets incorporating stormwater treatment landscapes.

The proposal connects street and square as a continuous civic space, with a design that combines pedestrian-friendly "slow streets" with the square's plazas that showcase public art. The goal is to create an iconic downtown gathering place while introducing downtown housing options for which there is demand but no supply. Markham Square could become a choice downtown neighborhood for an underserved market desiring downtown residential living in Central Arkansas.

"What conceptually links both projects is the focus on the everyday environment and design's role in solving for ecological, social and economic bottom lines simultaneously," Luoni said. "Our oral presentations to The Plan jury confirmed that, within the profession globally, there is a real concern over these matters of livability and resilience. In the case of Wood City, we show the benefits of timberizing the supply chain of suburban buildings as many of these building sectors are undergoing their own transformations in the real estate value chain. In Conway, we propose that challenges in affordable housing and gaps in urban infrastructure that lead to flooding can be addressed at the meso-scale of neighborhood design integrating city, landscape and house. The message linking both projects is that pragmatic solutions to daunting challenges can also deliver beautiful high-quality environments."

Winning projects for The Plan Award 2021 will be featured in The Plan's special year-end publication in December and can be found on The Plan's website.

The 10th anniversary of Fast Company's Innovation by Design Awards, which can be found in the magazine's October 2021 issue, recognize people, teams and companies that transform businesses, organizations and society through design. Winners, finalists and honorable mentions in the awards program are also featured on Fast Company's website.

One of the most sought-after design awards in the industry, Innovation by Design is the only competition to honor creative work at the intersection of design, business and innovation, recognizing the people, companies and trends that have steadily advanced design to the forefront of the business conversation.

The "Wood City" project was previously awarded a 2021 Green Good Design Award for Green Research/Technology by the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum for Architecture and Design. 

Community Design Center Collaborative 'Wood City' Project Wins Green Good Design Award

A proposal focused on reimagining common building types as mass timber projects was recognized in the 2021 Green Good Design Awards.

The U of A Community Design Center, working in collaboration with the U of A Resiliency Center, has been awarded a 2021 Green Good Design Award for Green Research/Technology by the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum for Architecture and Design. 

The Green Good Design awards focus on "the most important new international products and buildings and construction and planning projects that are leading the global way to a design that is fully sustainable and compatible with the highest standards of good environment," the awards release states. A jury composed of The European Centre's International Advisory Committee selected more than 150 new buildings, landscape projects and product designs from 28 nations for recognition in the awards program.

The U of A's winning project, "Wood City: Timberizing the Standard Real Estate Product Types," examines the question: "What if cities were built from the only building construction system that sequesters carbon and can be engineered to be 'energy positive' — wood?" The project rethinks common building typologies using mass timber as an alternative to concrete, steel and light-framed wood construction.

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

The project was a collaborative effort between the Community Design Center and the U of A Resiliency Center, an interdisciplinary sustainability initiative hosted by the Fay Jones School and led by executive director Marty Matlock. Matlock is also a professor in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering in the College of Engineering at the university.

Fay Jones School architecture students Matthew Scott, Mary Grace Corrao, Wenjie Zhu, Keturah Bethel and Jacob Alford also worked on the "Wood City" project through a studio conducted at the Community Design Center.

This is the fifth time that a collaborative project by the Community Design Center and Resiliency Center has received a Green Good Design Award. The Wood City project was sponsored by the Weyerhaeuser Giving Fund.

The goal of "Wood City" is to showcase design applications of mass timber construction among standard real estate products — the architectural building blocks of America's built environment. The objective goes beyond retrofitting these commercial typologies with a sustainable construction system and includes exploring related issues in the development of cities, including "negative externalities" like pollution, high fossil fuel use, sprawling land use, planned obsolescence and ugliness, Luoni said.

Current innovations in timber-engineered buildings have primarily focused on tall buildings, institutional and commercial structures, and custom homes. However, Luoni said, the ordinary low-rise building typologies common in low-density, vehicle-reliant landscapes hold the key to revolutionizing the carbon footprint through better building, urbanism and land use.

"Rather than begin with large-scale planning, 'Wood City' begins with the 19 standard real estate products comprising 80 percent of our built environments — fast food restaurants, storage facilities, multifamily apartments, metal warehouses, big-box retail, single-family houses, etc. — to rethink the entire city as a carbon sink," Luoni said. "Since mass timber buildings effectively sequester carbon, center partners, staff and students partnered to triangulate research in building prefabrication with future retrofit of suburbs and social evolution of common building types beyond simple logistics. Fast food restaurants became food halls accommodating food trucks and outdoor gathering; strip shopping centers became neighborhood centers; metal warehouse systems were hybridized to accommodate public functions; and assisted living facilities absorbed lessons from the hospitality industry."

Mass timber technology can play a key role in ensuring that the massive levels of resources the United States will allocate to building the next generation of human settlements — close to $1.5 trillion just in 2020 — are not squandered by poor practices in energy conservation, carbon reduction, ecosystem stewardship, nonrenewable resource conservation and climate change mitigation, Luoni said.

The award-winning projects will be exhibited through June 15 at the European Centre for Architecture Art Design in Athens and will be featured in the upcoming book Green Good Design 2021, to be published by Metropolitan Arts Press Ltd.

The Green Good Design Awards program aims to bring public appreciation and awareness to global design projects that emphasize sustainability and ecological restoration. 

Faculty-Led Projects Garner Three 2021 American Institute of Architects Honor Awards

Three projects led by Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design faculty members have been recognized with accolades in three different categories of the American Institute of Architects' 2021 Honor Awards Program.

The AIA Honor Awards program is the top design awards program nationally for architecture, urban design and interior architecture. This year's award-winning projects will be celebrated this summer at the virtual AIA Annual Expo and Conference and featured in a forthcoming issue of Architect magazine, the official magazine of the AIA. 

The Lamplighter School Innovation Lab, by Marlon Blackwell Architects, has won an Honor Award for Architecture, and the firm's CO-OP Ramen project has won an Honor Award for Interior Architecture. Rebuilding a Local Food Economy: Oahu, Hawaii, a project by the U of A Community Design Center in partnership with the U of A Resiliency Center, has won an Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design. 

Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, is founder of his Fayetteville-based design practice, where he and Ati Johari Blackwell are both principals. 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, was named the 2020 Southeastern Conference Professor of the Year, and was elected to become a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters earlier this year.

"In both of these projects, what we're attempting to do is enrich building typologies that are often either overdone or underdone," Blackwell said. "In the case of CO-OP, it's a very simple articulation of the ceiling using off-the-shelf plywood sheets with painted edges. And in the Lamplighter School, we're really trying to dignify the place of learning with a relatively simple palette and variation in the different spaces of learning. Each of these is responsive to their place and to the material culture of their place — both immediate to the site, but also to the region."

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

"Hawaii is the world's most remote population center, yet it imports more than 90 percent of its food from the U.S. mainland, leading to various forms of food insecurity," Luoni said. "Our work with the state involves development of a middle market infrastructure of local farmers, processors, distributors, food businesses and wholesale markets lost in the wake of global agrifood supply chains. The island-wide food supply chain is structured around a 34-acre urban food hub complex, a university-based food innovation center and remote farm-based food micro-processing centers. The project uses design thinking to construct statewide policy, economic development and resource supply chains in a next-generation infrastructure that models community resiliency and lower carbon futures. Most importantly, we know that solving for complex problems gives us the opportunity to also create beautiful places."

The Lamplighter School Innovation Lab is one of 10 projects recognized in the 2021 Architecture Awards program, which "celebrates the best contemporary architecture and highlights the many ways buildings and spaces can improve lives," according to the AIA press release. When selecting this year's winners, the nine-member jury considered design achievement, including "a sense of place, purpose, history and environmental sustainability," the release states. 

The Lamplighter School Innovation Lab in Dallas, Texas, is a state-of-the-art, 10,600-square-foot structure that includes a series of collaborative spaces specifically tailored to woodworking, chemistry and physics that prompt students to explore rather than rely on instruction.

The Innovation Lab is the center of a master plan started in 2014 for this private school that serves 450 pre-kindergarten through fourth-grade students in the North Dallas area. The school campus was designed in the 1960s by O'Neil Ford, the leading Texas proponent of the mid-century modern approach.

Wrapped in copper and featuring cypress wood planks outside and in, the Innovation Lab's material palette, both warm and refined, is at home among the original buildings. Inside, the typical cellular classroom arrangement is replaced by an open landscape that encourages exploration. Its porous nature allows students to flow between indoor classrooms and outdoor learning opportunities that are rooted in the local ecology, presenting students with ample opportunities to consider new ideas and experiment.

CO-OP Ramen is one of seven projects recognized in the 2021 Interior Architecture Awards program, which celebrates "the most innovative interior spaces," according to the AIA release. The five-member jury evaluated entries based on design achievement, including "sense of place and purpose, ecology and environmental sustainability and history."

CO-OP Ramen, located in the 8th Street Market in Bentonville, is a casual dining restaurant 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.

Rebuilding a Local Food Economy: Oahu, Hawaii is one of five projects recognized in the 2021 Regional and Urban Design Awards program, which recognizes the best in urban design, regional and city planning, and community development. The five-member jury considered how well each design addresses environmental, social and economic issues through sustainable strategies. This includes the "ability to collect and distribute resident renewable resources and energies, while enhancing quality of life and promoting social equity," the AIA release states.

The Rebuilding a Local Food Economy: Oahu, Hawaii project represents four years of work with the State of Hawaii Department of Agriculture's Agribusiness Development Corporation and its Aquaculture and Livestock Support Services, and Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz in the Hawaii State Legislature. The three projects covered under the award include the Whitmore Food Hub; the Wahiawa Value-Added Product Development Center for the Hawaii University System and designed in partnership with Urban Works, an architecture and urban design firm in Honolulu; and the Farm Base Yard Prototype. 

This is the 13th AIA Honor Award the U of A Community Design Center has received; all have been in the Regional and Urban Design category. Marlon Blackwell Architects has received a total of 16 national AIA awards. These two latest awards bring the total AIA Honor Awards the firm has received to eight — across the categories of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Regional and Urban Design. 

Fay Jones School Faculty-Led Projects Recognized with 2021 Architectural Education Awards

Three projects led by Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design faculty at the U of A have received national awards from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

The U of A Community Design Center received a 2021 Housing Design Education Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture/American Institute of Architects for its "Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff" plan. The plan proposes redeveloping select neighborhoods with multi-family units to provide attainable workforce housing and catalyze investment throughout the downtown Pine Bluff area.

"Negotiation Tables" received a 2021 Design-Build Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. The project, a mobile community engagement tool used to enhance communication about housing-related issues, was led by John Folan, head of the Department of Architecture, through the Urban Design Build Studio.

"All Access," a design-build for a retail garden nursery operated by a non-profit entrepreneur in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, received a 2021 Faculty Design Honorable Mention from the association. Folan also led this project through the Urban Design Build Studio.

The 2021 Architectural Education Awards were announced at the ACSA 109th Annual Meeting, which was held virtually March 24-26.

The "Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff" proposal was developed in a fall 2017 architectural design studio led by Stephen Luoni, director of the U of A Community Design Center. Luoni is also a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies at the university.

The studio prepared a downtown revitalization plan for Pine Bluff, a once-prosperous cultural urban center in the Arkansas Delta that is now the nation's second-fastest shrinking city. The housing-first initiative focused on building neighborhoods around downtown "centers of strength" that serve as starting points anchoring the neighborhood regeneration.

"Re-Live Downtown" is structured around affordable walk-up housing types common to early 20th-century urban neighborhoods known as "missing middle housing" — multifamily housing types (between two and 12 units) encompassing townhouses, duplexes, live-work units, triple-deckers and multiplexes, which are indispensable in regenerating downtown neighborhood densities.

The studio designed 28 walk-up housing prototypes for Pine Bluff after learning about how economy of means impacts design approaches and general decision making. They also studied missing middle housing types — and its specific urbanism — in nearby Memphis and St. Louis.

"One of the design center's areas of long-term interest has been the design of housing in communal formats where multiple services are delivered beyond that of simply providing a unit," Luoni said. "Here, students and staff partnered to showcase the centrality of housing environments in creating a human-centered regeneration of downtown. This is the center's eighth housing award in the program's 14-year history and communicates our program's leadership on a much under-examined subject matter in architectural education."   

The "Negotiation Tables" project acts as an on-site negotiation table for community leaders, financial counselors, social counselors and residents to discuss vacancy, gentrification, displacement and need. The project was deployed in different neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, and it provided a platform to enhance communication and collect oral histories.

Pittsburgh neighborhoods were impacted significantly by urban renewal efforts that led to the loss of 30 percent of the building stock over a 20-year period. After the implementation of a community master plan in 1999, the area today is home to a diverse population from a large range of socioeconomic backgrounds, but that diversity is being threatened by gentrification and displacement. Recent development has perpetuated racial and economic tensions despite strong advocacy and stabilization programs targeted at helping long-time residents. Housing is being constructed for all income levels, but inclusivity remains elusive.

At these on-site negotiation tables, people are engaged in conversation about their communities and can freely speak for as long as they wish. With consent, conversations are recorded, formatted and posted to the web to illustrate what issues are important to community members across the city of Pittsburgh. The intent is to collect a large arsenal of oral histories that will create a historical narrative described by the residents of Pittsburgh.

The mobile outreach and demonstration tool enhances understanding and knowledge building that aspires to aid in addressing these challenging issues. The project offers a network of adaptable forms that can be used as a communal table for feasts in the neighborhoods, storytelling, real-time manipulation of building design in virtual reality and a theater.

The design objectives for the "All Access" design-build were to use vernacular strategies for the passive control of air, light and water; demonstrate what can be done with reused/recycled materials; and employ construction strategies that could be completed by people with knowledge bases and skills still in development. The site lease prohibited the installation of permanent structures, so the design employs principles of component-based pre-fabrication and design for deconstruction.

Predicated on systems for mass production, the structure developed for the retail garden nursery, Floriated Interpretation, demonstrates how universal components from the "All Access" system can be integrated into the creation of a site-specific design.

The project engaged the local community, including local youth, artists, trade apprentices and university students, who came together to paint the roof graphic. Materials for the project were harvested from deconstruction projects and overstock, which diverted waste from landfills. The tailored features of the "All Access" system are intended to help Floriated Interpretation operate more effectively while promoting community unity and empowering youth.

"The success and recognition for these projects is truly a reflection of the many hands and minds that were invested in realizing them," Folan said. "Both have had an impact in the communities they emerged from, and both have addressed needs identified by the residents of those communities. As much as the recognitions address the projects themselves, both projects are extensions of processes predicated on listening."