Because of an American Airlines computer glitch in Dallas, Kevin McClurkan, scheduled lecturer for the Architecture and Design Network's Art of Architecture event tonight, can't make it. The event will be rescheduled.

• Ennead Architects' Vietnam War Memorial project

The Architecture and Design Network continues its Art of Architecture lecture series tonight with Kevin McClurkan, a founding partner and management principal of Ennead Architects (formerly known as the Polshek Partnership) in New York. The talk is 6 p.m. at the Arkansas Arts Center; a 5:30 p.m. reception will precede the talk.

McClurkan is an Arkansas native and earned his B.A. in architecture from the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the UA, where he received the Edward Durell Stone Award for Excellence in Design in 1983. The Polshek Partnership designed the Clinton Presidential Library; a project they will complete in 2014 is shown in the artwork above.

McClurkan is working with Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects on the renovation and expansion of the Robinson Center.

The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, email ardenetwork@icloud.com.

• Collaborative Practice Award winning design.

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture awarded the University of Arkansas Community Design Center its Collaborative Practice Award for the CDC's "Building Neighborhoods that Build Social and Economic Prosperity: Manual for a Complete Neighborhood," a collaboration between the Fay Jones School of Architecture and the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology in Rwanda. The project team included Stephen Luoni, director of the center; Korydon Smith, formerly with the Fay Jones School; Peter Rich, an architect from South Africa who was the 2011 John G. Williams Visiting Professor in the Fay Jones School; and Jeffrey Huber, assistant director at the center. Participating students were Samuel Annabel, Andrew Arkell, Ryan Campbell, Enrique Colcha Chavarrea, Long Dinh, Hanna Ibrahim, Kareem Jack, Tanner Sutton and Ginger Traywick.

The Community Design Center won a second award as well: the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture/American Institute of Architects Housing Design Education Award for the Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood. The project team for the Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood, which would be located on a block of land owned by the Little Rock Downtown Community Development Commission and has won other awards as well, were Luoni, Huber and Cory Amos, project designer at the center.

Read the UA's press release on the jump for more details.

Ceramicist Ron Meyers is credited with helping revitalize American studio pottery with his functional earthenware vessels and other forms, carved and painted with animals — rats, bats, rabbits, etc. The Arkansas Arts Center opens a show of his work tomorrow, March 22, called "Ron Meyers: A Potter's Menagerie," that will include 100 works by the artist.

Here's his artist's statement, from Red Lodge Clay Center in Montana:

Working in clay and making functional pottery has never been a problem for me. I have never felt the need to dismiss or disregard the concept of function because it was something less than art. I have never found making useful pieces confining or restrictive. In fact, I find that the opposite seems true. The longer I stay involved, the more alternatives and possibilities there are that seem to present themselves. Along with the functional aspects of the piece, I strive to have the end product reflect my own sensitivity and awareness to the material itself and its traditions. The pieces that I'm most pleased with are those that come closest to best integrating the form and surface, the spontaneity and fluidity of the clay along with the object's use.

As you can see from the flier above (click to enlarge), the Friends of Contemporary Craft will bring the artist and the film "Ron Meyers and the Usual Suspects" to the Arts Center on April 7. The event begins at 5 p.m.; tickets are $5 for FOCC members and $10 for non-members.

• Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia

The Architecture and Design Network is bringing in famed architect Billie Tsien to lecture at the Arkansas Arts Center at 6 p.m. Tuesday, March 5. (The original post said March 7; Tuesday is the 5th. Apologies.)

Tsien and her her husband, Tod Williams, were the architects for the 93,000-square-foot Barnes Foundation museum in Philadelphia, the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, the David Rubinstein Atrium of New York’s Lincoln Center, the American Folk Art Museum in New York and many other distinguished buildings. There will be a reception at 5:30 before her talk, "HEART/HAND."

From the press release:

Born in Ithaca New York, Billie Tsien received her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from Yale and her Master in Architecture from UCLA. Currently, in addition to practicing, teaching and lecturing, she serves on the advisory council for the Yale School of Architecture. In 2007 Tsien was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Tsien and her husband, Tod Williams, have been working together since 1977. Their firm, which operates out of a small, unpretentious studio on Central Park South in New York City, has earned wide acclaim for its work. This past December, the American Institute of Architects awarded the firm its prestigious 2013 Architecture Firm Award in recognition of work that “reveals a contemporary sensibility and intelligence.” Given annually, the award is the highest honor the AIA bestows on a firm. It recognizes a practice that has consistently produced distinguished architecture for at least ten years.

Architecture and Design Network includes the Arkansas Arts Center, the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture and the Central Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Kroloff was dean of architecture at Tulane University when New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina. He is credited with bringing back 97 percent of the student body and 100 percent of its faculty after the hurricane and he participated in the Bring New Orleans Back Commission. You can read more on Kroloff here and see a video of his 2008 TED appearance.

The design was created as a collaboration between fifth-year architecture students in the University of Arkansas School of Architecture and the University’s Community Design Center. Writer Kaid Benfield describes how the Pettaway design came about:

In Pettaway, the students worked with a citizen advisory committee who, among other preferences, wished to avoid flat roofs or metal siding — nothing "aggressively modern," according to Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. The designers looked for ways to blend traditional architectural elements — porches, balconies, terraces, pitched roofs — with modern principles — open floor plans, abundant light, natural airflow, refined choice of materials. I like what I can see of the results — a fresh look, but one in harmony with the scale and character of period housing in the neighborhood. At least one awards jury referred to the design as a "community within a neighborhood," and that looks exactly right to me.

Even better, the pocket neighborhood could be just the beginning. There is a larger revitalization plan in the works for Pettaway. The Neighborhood Revitalization Manual mentioned above was commissioned by the same set of partners and elaborates a set of excellent principles for restoring the surrounding district. The goal is to bring completeness and ambition again to this once-thriving area whose proximity to downtown positions it well for a revival, and to do so without displacing current residents. Among the concepts discussed in the Manual are a master plan, a form-based code, improvements to walkability, and high-quality infill development.

Kent Taylor of Cromwell Architects and Engineers and David Berry, COO of Arkansas Children's Hospital, will present at talk on the design and construction of the new $121 million south wing of the hospital at 6 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 24, at the Clinton School of Public Service.

The Architecture and Design Network presentation will include a virtual tour of the 258,000-square-foot structure, which houses a new emergency department, expanded cardiovascular and neonatal intensive care units, a new unit for children with blood disorders and 54 beds for patients who require hospitalization.

The lecture is free. To reserve seats, email publicprograms@clintonschool.uasys.edu or call 683-5239.

Series supporters include the Central Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the Arkansas Arts Center and the University of Arkansas’ Fay Jones School of Architecture.

• Rock Street Pocket Housing plan

The "Rock Street Pocket Housing" plan (also known as the Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood) has brought an American Institute of Architects Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design to the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, the Downtown Little Rock Community Development Corp. announced today.

The pocket neighborhood, designed by Design Center staff and architecture students at the University of Arkansas's Fay Jones School of Architecture for NLRCDC property on Rock Street between 17th and 19th streets in the Pettaway neighborhood, features affordable homes of modern design clustered around a shared greenspace. The award is the second for the Pettaway design: Last year, it won the "On the Boards" Grand Award of Residential Architect magazine.

Juror comments from the AIA website on the award:

This is a great integration of inventive architecture and sustainable urbanism into a traditional, low-income fabric. The project does a very interesting and successful job of comingling variations of public and private space. By creating variations in the housing typology, building placement on the site and landscape treatments, the development proposal has appeal to multiple household types, creates private and shared space, and it completes the urban context of the neighborhood.

It is thorough, achievable, and detailed with a fresh design approach that is also supportive of the context. The individual house designs do a remarkably good job of negotiating fronts to both the street and the communal space.

The project will be featured in Architectural Record magazine and at the AIA’s annual expo and convention this June in Denver.

• Chapterhouse and Chapel at Saint John’s Abbey and University

Another error!

I mistakenly left out of the print version of the Times art calendar (which is why it's a good idea sometimes to check the online calendar on the homepage) the upcoming Architecture and Design Network lecture set for Tuesday, Nov. 13, at the Darragh Center. So here's notice: Vincent James and Jennifer Yoos, principals of the architecture firm VJAA in Minneapolis, will talk about their approach to architecture and environmental design. The lecture begins at 6 p.m. after a 5:30 p.m. reception.

VJAA received the American Institute of Architects' 2012 Architecture Firm Award and James and Yoos are this year’s John G. Williams Distinguished Visiting Professors for the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas.

Among their recently completed projects: the Hostler Student Center at the American University of Beirut and a Guesthouse, Chapterhouse and Chapel at Saint John’s Abbey and University (see image above). They are now at work on the new Walker Library in Minneapolis, the Welland International Flatwater Center for the Toronto 2015 Pan Am Games, a house prototype for Habitat for Humanity (Detroit)/Public Architecture (San Francisco) and the new African Art Galleries reinstallation at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

The lecture is the second in the Architecture and Design Network's Art of Architecture lecture series this season.

• Jones, from the UA Libraries' Special Collections

“Outside the Pale: The Architecture of Fay Jones,” an exhibit of artifacts on loan from the Old State House Museum and the University of Arkansas, opens today at Laman Library and will run through Aug. 25.

Laman has a connection to the famed UA architect, who was an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright: He designed the gazebo in the library plaza in the early 1970s.

The exhibit takes its name from a book published by the Department of Arkansas Heritage and will be accompanied by an essay by Robert Adams Ivy, author of "Fay Jones: Architect." Ivy writes:

"Fay Jones architecture begins in order and ends in mystery. His role can perhaps best be understood as a mediator, a human consciousness that has arisen from the Arkansas soil and scoured the cosmos, then spoken through the voices of stone and wood, glass and steel. Art, philosophy, craft, and human aspiration coalesce in his masterworks, transformed from acts of will into harmonies: Jones lets space sing."

• Charles and Ray Eames

StudioMain at 1423 S. Main is showing the documentary "EAMES: The Architect and the Painter," about the husband-and-wife design team of Charles and Ray Eames, tonight. Little Rock designer Harry Loucks will give an introductory talk at 7 p.m. The showing is in conjunction with the current exhibition of furniture by UALR Applied Design students.

Slideshow

Main Street Creative Corridor

Click to View 4 slides

StudioMain, the architecture cooperative at 1423 Main St., will display designs for Main Street by fourth-year students in the University of Arkansas's Fay Jones School of Architecture at the 2nd Friday Art Night event coming up June 8.

The designs are part of the students' comprehensive studio, directed by architect Marlon Blackwell and professor Tahar Messadi and sponsored by WER Architects. The designs are competitive; visitors to StudioMain at Friday's event (5-8 p.m.) can vote for their favorites for a People's Choice award.

The images shown here are by Patrick Templeton, Calli Verkamp, Kelsey Tucker and Rachael Rabben. The students have spent the past two semesters imagining what Main Street could look like as part of Main Street Creative Corridor planning.

• State Capitol

The Architecture and Design Network is sponsoring an Art of Architecture presentation tonight in the old Supreme Court chambers of the state Capitol, which is celebrating its 101st anniversary.

Talking about the building will be Dr. David Ware, Capitol historian; Gary Clements of Clements & Associates/Architecture Inc.; John Greer Jr., vice-president of WER Architects; and Tommy Jameson of Jameson Architects.

The group is gathering at 5:30 p.m. for a reception; talks start at 6 p.m. Other sponsors include the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas, the Central Arkansas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the Arkansas Arts Center.

• Pettaway Pocket Park

Residential Architect awarded its "On the Boards" Grand Award to the Pettaway Park Neighborhood project, collaboration between students in the UA's Fay Jones School of Architecture and staff of the UA Community Design Center.

The design was commissioned by the Downtown Little Rock Community Development Corp. for five parcels it owns on Rock Street between 17th and 19th streets. Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center, and others with the architectural group suggested combining the parcels to create a pocket neighborhood that would place nine 1,200-square-foot homes, each costing around $100,000 around a shared green space. The design will be featured in Residential Architect's March-April issue.

See more images here. The press release follows.