ARCHITECT magazine has named Marlon Blackwell Architects of Fayetteville the top firm in the design category of its national 2016 Architect 50 awards. The magazine, the journal of the American Institute of Architects, said this about the firm’s designs:
Recent small projects like a Montessori school in Fayetteville and a practice facility for a golf club in the Ozarks demonstrate a rigorous and sometimes daring vernacular Modernism, fashioned on very lean budgets. But the firm’s talents don’t stop at the jewel-box scale. It has also designed a 356,000-square-foot high school expansion in Fayetteville, and collaborated with James Corner Field Operations to remake Shelby Farms Park in Memphis, one of the largest urban parks in the country.
Blackwell Architects outranked top 10 firms from Chicago; Boston; Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; New York; Brooklyn and Kansas City. Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects ranked 41st out of the top 50 firms in the design category.