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." 

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.