Show Notes

Matt (00:07):

Hey, welcome to the show Marlon. Glad to have you on here.

Marlon (00:19):

Thanks Matt! Good to be here.

Matt (00:21):

Yeah, it’s an honor to have you on here. You’re a pretty big name in architecture and I think it’s going to be a fun discussion. So without further ado, you want to just jump right in.

Marlon (00:32):

Sure. Hit, hit me with your, your best shot.

Matt (00:37):

Well, let’s, let’s start off and learn a little bit more about you and your background basically where you started, where the story of Marlon began and then we’ll, we’ll kind of take it from there.

Marlon (00:53):

Okay. how I began in architecture, right. How far did we go back? So, well, I mean, I think it’s something that the realization that architecture’s something I wanted to pursue or study really came out of, you know, pursuit of other things initially. I mean, I when I was growing up, I grew up near the near the Everglades actually well I’m south Florida, so I had a, and I had a real love for nature I had developed. And of course, if you’re in your, the Everglades, there’s a lot of things that can eat you. So, a real fear of nature is a good thing too. So, but I had had this desire to be a paleontologist and you know, love to put in skeletons and bones together and pieces. And, you know, I was very interested in, you know, what you don’t see in nature in history and then that sort of evolved into desire to right, to be a journalist or creative writer. Because I love to tell stories. I love stories. And then you know, then it starts to evolve again, I all through my junior high and high school and even part of college, I cartoon like drew had a real passion for developing my own characters against stories and, and reductive figures. I love the comics. And so that was something I really I really enjoyed quite a bit. I think I read someplace and I’ve said this tofu before I put some articles, something about like a majority of cartoonists for some reason or another have like alcohol issues or something. That’s like, you know, I’m young. And I was like, oh, I don’t be any part of that. And I would, same time. I was, you know, in, in one of those classes you take in high school drafting or whatever night, and we were asked to design her own house, what would that be? And build a model. And so I did that and that was, I was a lot of fun. Cause he’d draw, you make physical models really tapped into the imagination. And I wouldn’t have to worry less about alcohol problems presuming an art architecture anyway. So I decided to become an architect, which of course comes with its whole host of issues as well, including our office. But that’s, that was it. So I kind of, you know, not knowing anything I’m really read anything. And I just said, you know, when I graduate from high school, I’m going to go to architecture school to become an architect. And I romanticize that. I had imagined what that might be like I had heard of Frank Lloyd Wright, but beyond that, to me, it was just a way to have a profession, but to draw it, to imagine it to have a creative outlet. So that’s how I began. So it’s a long winded answer to your short question, but there’s just something that you sort of stumble and Bumble along you know, asking questions as you go and trying to see what’s going to be a good fit. Yeah,

Matt (04:12):

That’s interesting. So, from paleontology to, to writing, that’s the, I guess comics. So do you think paleontology, do you use any of that fascination with structure and kind of Design it?

Marlon (04:36):

I think I, I’m very fascinated with things that are nature made, you know, the creatures and figures and how they sit upon the earth and how they meet the sky. And there there’s an, a kind of expressive character is very different from, for every organism or every type of creature. Right. And so that’s, and then I, I’m often looking for analogies between creatures and then things that are more nature made or not nature made, but culture mean, so I w I, you know, I will look for early on in my work once I sort of started developing a voice or a sensibility about what I wanted to do, I, I would look for patterns between, let’s say a dragon fly and a camper, you know had, you know, certain formal relationships or whatever.

Marlon (05:38):

It wasn’t anything scientific, but it was a way to discover the patterns that connect that speak to perhaps a higher order of life. You know, that everything isn’t compartmentalizing distinctly different. It’s actually, there’s, we’re, we’re quite related right. When it comes life and things, so sure. Yeah. And now, and what we make. So that’s, that’s been an ongoing passion and interest, not only in my work, but also in the way I teach and think about you know, learning and developing a language or vocabulary for the word

Matt (06:20):

Yeah. That ideology is and you can, you can see that in your designs. And it’s very, it’s very interesting to see how you’re, you’re bringing patterns and shapes and really trying to pull in some of the natural features that, you know, are, are apparent everywhere.

Marlon (06:47):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, I think I did a series of early prototypes once I gotten out of graduate school and I didn’t have work, so I was inventing projects, but it was a way to you know, like what would happen if you took a bull frog and kind of married him with the Villa Savoye, you know, kind of weird. So I call him the, you know, it’s like the unholy unions of the animate and inanimate or like instead of dragon flag Canberra, a, you know, a fish with a boathouse or something like, so just looking at sort of new ways in which you could develop a formal language and a material instead of material logics, but also how those could respond to specific conditions in the American landscape, you know, really trying to combine all of these things, to find a voice that it can bridge the gap between the local, right. And a more universal understanding of the language of our discipline, you know, temporary language.

Matt (08:05):

Yeah. So you started to kind of create your own style and vision?

Marlon (08:14):

I guess I tend to call it vocabulary, but yeah. Vocabulary well, because it’s more typologically rooted. And I think typology is very different from style styles, tend to be more fixed type policies. I think for me are a little bit more dynamic and evolutionary and of course styles evolve too, but they, they, yeah. I they’re not as

Matt (08:45):

Dynamic or fluid. Yeah. So, so what did your, what is your first foray? You said you were coming up with your own before you actually started your own career, but what did that look like to start with?

Marlon (09:05):

Well, it was ugly mostly, I mean, again, I’m talking about after grad school and after 10 years professional experience, so that I was working from a somewhat more developed sensibility and body of knowledge. Right. And especially with body of disciplinary knowledge, when I first started out in school, I mean, it was pretty raw. I mean, quite frankly really didn’t know how to leverage the strengths that I had. And I, wasn’t a particularly disciplined student. I kind of worked in spurts, you know, and that doesn’t serve you particularly well as to become a well-rounded student that way. Right. so I, you know, I, I struggled and I had moments of lucidness and insight, and then a lot of it, I was just trying to figure out, you know, how to do my laundry and you know, get a date for Saturday night or something. But I think once I got out and got into the profession and began to see and understand the complexity of what it is to actually make something then, then I got a little bit, I started to bear down a little bit, a little bit more serious. I understood pretty quickly that working in an office from nine to five, at least for me, was only going to satisfy certain part of a creative kind of outlet as a creative outlet. And so I started, I did a lot of work outside of the office hours on my own, whether it was freelance work or competitions, or even my own kind of imaginary stuff. Yeah. So doing that for 10 years, it sort of evolved to me was some of it was pretty bad, pretty ugly, but I started to discover you know, some of my interests were still rooted in cartoons in cartooning and how to develop a, a reductive pallet right.

Marlon (11:09):

Of forms and figures that could be very expressive in the most minimal way. So that kind of a minimal means to achieve a maximum of meaning. And so that’s something I just continued to work and become a little bit more self-conscious about, you know, it’s intuitive. So a lot of the work that I discovered I was doing was actually developed all in profile and section less, so implant and, and, and then much more reductive cause especially like where I worked in places like Louisiana some in Boston, five years of Boston, but you know, in Arkansas, you know, most, everything has some variation of a box, you know, so it’s like, you know, you’re not going to do the parametric and family artists are, you won’t get a whole lot bill. So, you know, how do I create high degree of expressive character and the things that we do through very simple by polities informs, and that’s where the abstraction starts to come in, where you really start to understand the familiarity of local form, but combine that with your understanding of the contemporary language, right.

Marlon (12:34):

And through that combination, you start to create something that’s somewhat strangely familiar there. It has a, as I kind of I would call it productive tension with the local between the local and the global right. Again, and that’s good because it situates itself, I think in a particular way that is relevant to its place, but at the same time could be a model or a way to inspire or to connect to places beyond your own.

Matt (13:06):

Gotcha. Wow. And you continue to kind of develop this vocabulary over that 10 years and then decided that there was some other way you could express or its own vocabulary

Marlon (14:51):

Yeah. Yeah. Well that, that, that evolved you know, again, 10 years in practice in Southern Louisiana in Boston and then a desire to kind of dive back into academics. So going back to a master’s program, but I, I actually picked a program that would allow me to get a master’s, but also in Europe. So I actually chose the Syracuse program in Florence, Italy, because I never really spent much time in Europe. I’d been to Mexico and that sort of thing, but so spent a year there and just was an amazing experience, great professors, a great program got to see, of course, a lot of Italy, both the, you know, everything from the medieval and Renaissance to the contemporary, you know, especially at that time, the 20th century works of people like Reddy Scarpa Libra host of Italian modernist Terrani but then getting to travel around Europe and really diving in and immersing herself and the folks like cruciate Vandero Alto, just concert, really.

Marlon (16:14):

It was just a full immersion for a year. And then coming out of that with the desire to perhaps teach and practice, to really become a liaison between the academy and the profession. And I had a lot of professional experience. I had taught a little bit at the Boston architectural center. I got a taste for it. I don’t think I was particularly good at it, but I figured I could learn how to teach, but I felt like I had might have something to say. And I thought, you know, the, the, the professors, when I was in school at all, were the ones that meant the most to me in many ways, all had a large practice background or have pro practices. Right. So I thought like I could be one of those folks and I got this great opportunity after teaching a year at Syracuse, once I got out of the, their programming, they hired me and I could have stayed up there, but I really wanted to get back south and from Alabama, from, from the south.

Marlon (17:08):

And even though I lived all over in a military family, I’d still, my roots were there culturally and otherwise. So I got this great opportunity and the university of Arkansas, and they basically said, if you’ll come here to teach we will make sure that you get in commissions to open up a practice. Wow. Yeah. Which was an incredible offer. And so, yeah, I dove in, of course they were at the time Faye Jones had just won the AIA gold medal few years before. It was a great example of how you can operate in what many people would think would be in the middle of nowhere and yet have a national, even international respected practice. So he proved it could be done. And that you could as he would say, you could rather than go to the world, you can bring the world to you.

Marlon (18:04):

And that was a, that was a great model for me. And I got to know him became a mentor. I never worked with him or anything, but I just, you know, there was he was very kind and accessible person, of course, a real genius in his own. Right. so yeah, that’s how it started out. And, you know, within months I had some work and I worked out of a spare bedroom that I had, and then I, I got married to my now partner it, but she was relation, she talked her into coming to Arkansas. How’d that discussion go? I get, I mean, she thought it would be short, lived staying here in orange sauce. He thought, oh, well, we’ll stay a few years. And now I know he’s going to want to move on.

Marlon (18:52):

She wanted to go to LA or something. She had went to school at university of Miami. But she has kind of, you know, come and she worked at another firm. I mean, I just, you know, I really taught, or that I practiced at the time when I was just getting some, getting going and trying to go through the process of sausage, making that it takes to actually make something on your own and, you know, getting constructed and get it to actually come out with the truth and integrity. That’s also interviewed in those initial sketches and last initial thoughts. And that’s a really tough to do that because very often architecture is a death by a thousand cuts, you know, from the conceptual idea to what you get at the end. So I, I was really assisted in coworking projects at a scale that I could control to some degree, everything from conceptualization to realization to the actual construction, how we helped manage that.

Marlon (19:48):

I did that for, you know, probably, I dunno, eight years kids started coming. Second kid came along, she kicked me out of the house, said, you’ve got to get an office, go put up an office. And then with the second kid, she started thinking, Hey, you know, why don’t we work together? You know, cause give me more flexibility with the kids. And, you know, we could start our own gig. And so I built up some momentum and everything, and it started, it made some sense and number, you know, to, she had, she had understood the digital. She was kind of more evolved that way. I was still drawing with a nine B pencil with, you know, drawing everything by hand all the details. So she, we transitioned some of the late nineties worked at TowerHouse, the honey house penthouse was drawn in pencil. That was probably the last project I did in pencil.

Marlon (20:40):

But the, the tower house, she actually, we had a Tangerine iMac that we, you did the first sort of Autodesk or, or, you know AutoCAD drawings. So pretty cool. But we opened it up and and then at the same time, the teaching is also taking off and MIT invites me to come teach there for a semester. And while I’m there, the TowerHouse shows up on the cover of architectural record, which is a huge deal, kind of launches you into national waiting zone. You know, you start to, you have a presence, you know, people like who the hell is this? And are they doing out there in Arkansas? So that was a big, big boom along with the honey house. All of that kind of got out there and we thought, okay, this is our moment. It’s going to take off.

Marlon (21:35):

And for two years we didn’t hardly have any work. I mean, it would just, nothing happens, you know? But we slowly started to get, you know, bit more work here and there, and sort of decided that to really have the impact that you think need to have in architecture, at least in my opinion, we had to move beyond the private residence really had to get into public work, institutional work and take that on. So we had an opportunity and to do, we had done a little bit of commercial work and succeeded there in developing a, more of a tectonic language rather than formal, because they were rehabs bond. We got a chance to do a library and the gingery library, and we took that on and that was a great adventure and a great outcome, but that really sort of cinched it for us, that, you know, it really had to be more public institution.

Marlon (22:32):

And then to figure out how to navigate these building types and program types, where a lot of really good architects, a lot of our group kind of effectively shut out, right? I mean, these there’s, a lot of these relationships are already some out and, you know, mediocrity is also institutionalized, you know, so they, you know, kind of repeats itself and it’s tough to break in and get, get a chance to be invited to dinner. And they get a chance to sit at the table and actually eat something. So that was, and we’re still working from a model. Faye Jones was my model for practice, which is, you don’t have business cards. You don’t collaborate, you don’t do competitions, you don’t work it you basically you do whatever walks through the door, your work is your calling card. Right. And that worked great.

Marlon (23:23):

That would, that would really great up until the recession. And then, you know, the phone quit ringing and, you know, it’s tough. We’ve got people on board now and some fairly serious work, but nobody’s calling and, you know, we’re in a death spiral as a firm. And I was inspired by Obama stimulus packages, you know, so I thought, well, wait, what we need is a stimulus. So we actually rather than go through our sturdy and cut back and everything, we actually went to the bank, we’ve always had good credit. And we knew the banker is right across the street because when nice things are working in a small town and he set us up with a credit line and we were able to take money out of that and invest in, you know, changing our business model. So where we you know, we had a website, we, we did our we did portfolios exciting.

Marlon (24:20):

We would do more, FQs RFPs, all those things. And, start team would be collaborating and figuring out how to do that stuff. And it was it was kind of Rocky and we had to lay people off and it was tough. Didn’t take a paycheck for a year and a half. I mean, it was you would, you know, pay our folks, but economically it was very, very difficult, but within about nine months, a year, we had a really nice high school project where we teamed up with two other firms. And then we were fortunate to get the new commission for the architecture school on campus. And so things took off from there, but it was really, you know, changing the business model and saying, okay, we’ve got to come at this a different way, or we’re going to be put, we’re putting ourselves in a box.

Marlon (25:13):

Right, right. you know, it’s like, it’s a, it’s a roller coaster. I mean, that’s and every time we used to think, oh man, we’re pulling into the train station, we’re going to get off the rollercoaster. It won’t be up. We’re going to be on the gravy train. Right. It’s going to be great. And then we’re back, you get up, you think you see up on the gravy train, it’s really just another section of it drops. So that’s, that’s been the story in many ways. Well,

Matt (25:49):

No, that’s, that’s, that’s interesting. Cause you know, I have noticed that your architecture does speak for itself. I mean, it’s very iconic. It’s very noticeable. You have, we’re talking about vocabulary. It’s very identifiable in the area when there isn’t much change in where mediocrity is the norm. But you also have to get those projects in the door.

Marlon (26:23):

Yeah, yeah. We live in the land of beige. So if you do anything outside of beige or anything even if it’s just riffing on, you know, vernaculars and things like that, it stands out, it’s like turning the volume up to 11, you know? So it doesn’t take much. Right, right. But what’s difficult. Is it for it to be good, just to be novel and different? Isn’t enough. Obviously you have to, it has to be useful where I live in. It’s not useful. You can’t create a value proposition with it. They’re not going to invest in. Right,

Matt (27:03):

Right. Let’s talk about that for a second. Just when you’re initially jumping into a project what are your initial thoughts? How do you, how do you begin to start to develop an idea? And I know that’s a big question, so maybe let’s look at it macro wide here. Just those initial thoughts of creating a concept.

Marlon (27:34):

Well, I mean, it requires a lot of research, you know, first of all, you know, we we look at projects we don’t have any bread and butter, right. So we don’t have a sunglass hut account you know. So every project is important, no matter how small or simple in scope or how complex. So we’re all of these projects we’re doing are contributing to a larger Mehta project where, you know, we’re looking at particular issues and things that are central to our core values. So we’ve built that up over time. And as, as I was saying early, we’ve also spent a lot of time getting familiar with current discourses, past discourses vocabulary, you know, contemporary vocabulary, really understanding how to use that, to help with what we, wherever we’re working. So what is the kind of local form or conditions material, culture, where we’re working.

Marlon (28:43):

So that is, you know, cause you’re not, I don’t want him to be able to leave you start from zero and here’s the, here’s the recipe cause that you have to have something built up. Sure. You don’t, you don’t create out of nothing. But typically when we get a project and we’re fortunate to secure a commissioner project, it’s really about the site. It’s about being on the site. It’s about understanding, you know, the basics of the environment either where the sun is, where the, where the wind is, you know, that sort of thing. The terrain the configuration of the site and am I going to be, oh, the site, am I on, am I going to disengage from it? You know, am I going to bury into it? You know, these sorts of things are all really a bat gets back to those early ideas about how things sit upon the earth. Right. And they express some character that comes with that. Right. and, and then really thinking about the typology, the bilirubin program and getting familiar with that. So we’re, we’re sort of simultaneously collecting information. And then typically what will happen. Once I get a sort of understanding of scale, I will make some drawings. Those are usually a series of sections or three-dimensional drawings made with a nine B pencil assault console and yellow trace typically

Marlon (30:25):

I’m really quick with that and then some diagrammatic plans, you know, basically more typological in a way that, you know, what kind of you know, is it a, is it a center void? Is it a linear scheme? You know, what is so, and then how that you know, response to the site. So that’s the initial beginning. And then what happens I have is, you know, obviously I have a great team here at the MBA folks that they will take those sketches and put it immediately into a BIM three, dimensionalize it, and with a lot of all the other information we have and create a workflow, so that there’ll be output from that and it’ll be raw and rough, but then I’ll trace back over it or sketch back over it, give it back then.

Marlon (31:19):

And then I’ll look to say, Hey, we need to look at this option, this option, this option. And then it just in the process keeps going, right? And there’s this workflow back and forth between the analog and the digital to the point where initially it’s more and more analog. And, but then as it evolves, it becomes more digital, right? You’re always, you always have the yellow trace there. And, and I require that with my folks in the firm, you have, must be able to draw by hand as well as digital and be able to create your own workflow. And, you know, it doesn’t have to be pretty, you know, right people where I don’t draw, well, these are thinking drawings, right. We’re not going to exhibit them, you know, in an art gallery. So, yeah. And that’s how we begin a project. And, and then it’s a lot of questions.

Marlon (32:07):

We ask a lot of questions of the client as well as ourselves you know, why are we doing this? Is this the best approach and that sort of thing. But we also, what’s, I’m leaving out here and I shouldn’t cause it, we spend a lot of time really listening to the users to the clients, what their aspirations are, what their needs are. So we’re addressing those as we go, right? So they are those concerns, those needs, the conditions around use are embodied and thoroughly integrated into the responses we’re making. Right. Even though I, my initial response may be somewhat arbitrary, not exclusively, but, you know we account for everything in the creative process. I think Susan Santosh talks this except for the arbitrary, which is always there how you begin or where you make a move or whatever. And we sort of embrace that too. Gotcha.

Matt (33:16):

So, when you’re, when you’re initially pulling together that first concept, you’re seeing how it, it relates to the site and how, I guess, how do you visualize when you’re on the site, maybe that, that interaction between the building and the public space, or even just around the building and the, just that interface. How do you have that interaction? How do you start to visualize that?

Marlon (33:55):

Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s through the act of growing, of course, but it’s also through an understanding that, you know, one of our aspirations in our work, especially if it’s public work, that it needs to come with public space. Right. you know, even in the private work think about you know, these opportunities for people socialize and together, but also opportunities for solitude and that still could be part of the public condition. Right. So how you scale that space what’s appropriate. And then how is that set up as it meets the building and, and does it permeate the building or, and that’s where typologies come in and, you know, you look at a dog trot and you understand that backspace flows through a dog trot, you know, where you, you know, you open up the middle and you can move through it, a breezeway, so to speak.

Marlon (34:52):

So that will, that’ll be one type of interface, right. Or porch you know, a deep overhang, a can lead, you know, something that creates a liminal zone between the building and the public space. Right. So it gives the opportunity for the building to embrace the public right. Physically, right. So reach out. Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense for us in places in the south. Right. So Arkansas, you know, just wherever we just did a park in Memphis that, you know, is all based on porches and porch language, Shelby farms, but we just completed a project in in Memphis not Memphis, excuse me, in Michigan and Detroit where, you know, that’s less of an issue. Sure. Yeah. We do some, but it’s mostly shrink wrapped, but we have courtyards in that case. And cause they needed controlled areas for this early childhood learning center to play or ways to fold the landscape into the building again, to create senses sense of security.

Marlon (36:04):

So we’re always thinking about how, you know, the experience on a day-to-day basis for the users and for the visitors is enhanced through the architecture, right. It’s a framework for living. Right. but we’re also very mindful of how we respond to the environment as particularities of the environment where we’re working and, and then back to the material culture where, you know, we’re looking at the raw material and how that through tradition and crafted is transformed. Right. You know, that, you know, basic forest or transforms in different types of products or stone, you know, that sort of thing. And we find ways that we always looking for ways to locally source what’s available to us and what’s renewable.

Matt (37:07):

Yeah. Yeah. to include this and come back a little bit to that, that initial phase, but of seeing how and understanding the needs of the public is really what it sounds like is, is you’re basically taking that input and finding ways to integrate the architecture into the needs of the people and right. And so how do you believe that or what, what makes that successful? What, what attributes of a project or something that you’re working on that, that really frames the public realm and adds to the public realm? What kinds of attributes do these projects possess?

Marlon (38:04):

I, I think it’s not to get overly idealistic about it or I mean, I’m not a big fan of utopias or whatever. I mean, I liked the messy vitality of things. So the idea that public space can happen in the suburban condition or even a rural condition. Well, of course so we don’t get too caught up in that. I think it’s, it’s a balance of scale and proportion is a big part of it. So, so it’s not, or under scale that proportion is always present. You know, that things are relative in scale to, you know, of course the human body, but to things like cars, you know, we, we, we’re not trying to get rid of cars. I live in a place where there’s more space than form the idea that you will walk everywhere and this part of Arkansas would be, be nuts, you know?

Marlon (38:59):

So how do you deal with the car and how do you make that experience better? Our Harvey medical clinic, you know, we thought of the building as something you would engage in 40, 50 miles an hour and something you engage just walking or biking, but you know, the parking lot becomes the public space and a series of bioswells and then you can actually drive through the building, which makes sense, cause you could drop the patients off underneath. Right. So for us, that is a form of public space, right. And no different in many ways than you know, park-like spaces or plazas or courtyards, right. They’re all kind of part of a vocabulary, a space that’s appropriate to, to the scale and the types of landscapes we’re working. Right. we don’t really, haven’t had done a lot of urban projects.

Marlon (39:52):

We’re doing one now in Boston, but w we call it a lot of our projects, even when they’re in towns, urban pastoral, because a lot of it just used to be farmland. It’s been annexed and even to be close to downtown, it might be Jesus 30 acres of empty stuff, you know, and they can’t fill all that up. Right. So, so how do you do with the deal with the spaces in between? And a basic motto we’ve had is that the forums are important, but the spaces between the forms are perhaps even more important. So always have being attentive in an inclusive way of all the space that you’re given there. Isn’t just the figure in the ground, the plus, and then the minus, right. For us, it’s all plus plus plus plus plus bigger finger. And I think it’s a, it’s a I wouldn’t say it’s a different way of looking at it, but it is a more, as a value that we, a core value than how we look at every project. Right.

Matt (40:54):

More, more holistically. You’re not just providing a building in a space you’ve created, you’ve choreographed the space around the building to provide the user a an experience throughout.

Marlon (41:11):

Right. Right. And then working with our landscape architects, you know, that often have, and we all try to get on the same page in that regard and that further enriches that experience as well. Right.

Matt (41:25):

Right. Well, looking forward, I know you don’t have a whole lot of time left, so I want to, I want to kind of take a step forward and look at where you’re going and where your firm is going and what do you see the legacy of Marlon Blackwell yourself and your firm as a whole.

Marlon (41:48):

That’s that, yeah. The, well, I don’t know the legacy thing is for other people. I don’t, I don’t know. I mean, we, we are basically trying to walk the line in our own truth. That’s, you know, try to understand the truth as we see it, true things that we searched for and just kind of walk the line in that regard but allow the work to evolve. And I think what induces the work to involve are two things. One is to get, to continue to practice and keep doing the work. Even if it’s the same type of building type we’ve done 2009, we got the chance to do our first educational facility. We’ve done probably 10 since then. And every time we can take ideas that we discover why we, we reiterate them, we fold them back in and we keep getting better in that time.

Marlon (42:49):

So that’s one trajectory of where we’re going to just keep getting better at what we’re doing in particular types. The other is to have more types to work with. And so we are changing scales. Like, we’re say we’re doing our first tall building. We’re doing our first embassy, Iowa, which is really exciting. We’d love to have the opportunity to do, you know, a museum or are these other projects that we haven’t had you know, more cultural work, but we love getting to do the educational and the recreational, you know, we were working with water parks. So I, I see that continuing to happen and to evolve, but I’m happy, you know, if I just keep working, even in the same type apology for while I’m always learning something, because I know whatever project we’re working on, whether it’s a carport or you know, or an embassy, or we’re doing a new sports medicine Chile, it’s all part of the metal project, right?

Marlon (43:59):

It’s all part of this larger project that we’re working on that deals with the relevancy of marketecture and how it enriches the day-to-day experience of people’s lives and you know how it can be an architecture you know in its place, in and of its and for its place. And when I say that, I’m not just talking about the environment, but talking about the folks that live there as well. Yeah. So that, that, that’s what we’re doing. We just want to get better at what we do, you know? Yeah.

Matt (44:48):

It’s still building the legacy, whether or not you see that.

Marlon (44:51):

Yeah. I mean, I don’t wanna, I don’t want to say, you know, I want to be remembered as blah, blah, blah, blah blank. Yeah. I’ll let other folks figure that out.

Matt (45:03):

Right. Right. But your work explains your legacy for you.

Marlon (45:08):

It should speak for itself. I mean, I go back to Fe I mean, that’s what he always do. He says, you know, the works to call it car, the work is, it is what you have to contribute is the work, you know, and, and that’s how we sort of thought about it. And the only thing we can hope for is more and more opportunity to do the work. And that’s, that’s our goal, but, you know, we’re now getting into the position where we have to be, I think yeah, I’m, I’m getting from within my firm, you know, guys saying we gotta be very careful about what we decide to do or not to do. Sure, sure. But I think I think we will continue to try to underscore and demonstrate and be a model for in the profession or as a firm that, you know, says, Hey, architecture can happen anywhere at any scale at any budget and for anyone. And that it’s not just reserved for the elite view, but it’s, it’s, it should be available to everyone. And so, you know, we’re going to continue to fight that good fight.

Matt (46:17):

Yeah. You are definitely well on your way. And I really appreciate all your time, if you want to just tell us where we can find out a little bit more about you and your firm, and

Marlon (46:33):

Well, just do what I do. If I want to find out about something these days I Google, you know, it’s not about getting the right answer, it’s just asking the right questions. So just ask a question, whatever you want to know, just don’t ask about my criminal history, or hopefully you won’t find anything, but you know, you can find us at Norman blackwell.com. I believe it’s our, our website. And we do have a new monograph will be coming out in May of 2022. It’s called radical practice Princeton, architectural presses of publishers. And it should be really I don’t want to say too much about the book, but it’s, it’s going to be featuring about 14 projects. But also through the lens of the photographic work of Tim Hursley well known architectural photographer and the work he’s been doing in kind of really documenting the underbelly of the American landscape and the detritus and flotsam and jetsam that you find in that landscape and how that some ways really informs our own, our own efforts. So I think it’ll be a monograph with a different twist to it. So, but the able to look out for that.

Matt (47:55):

Awesome. Awesome. Well, I said, I really appreciate your time Marlon it’s it was a pleasure to hear about your experiences and I would love to keep in touch.

Marlon (48:07):

Absolutely. Please do. And good luck to everybody out there and please be safe. Be well, thanks!