Visiting scholars Hamoda Youssef (left) and Eman Abdel-Sabour are studying sustainable planning at the school's Community Design Center. Photo by Cade Jacobs.

Two visiting scholars, Eman Abdel-Sabour and Hamoda Youssef, have come from Cairo via graduate studies in Italy to the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, where they have jumped right into a master planning study for Little Rock's historic McArthur Park.

Their goal? Absorb -- and bring home to Egypt -- the Community Design Center's award-winning ideas on sustainable planning and development.

"Currently Egypt is booming," said Eman Abdel-Sabour. "There are lots of projects, but we don't have the new thinking in sustainability."

"We want to go back and offer something new to our community," added Hamoda Youssef, who met and married Abdel-Sabour when the two were pursuing post-graduate studies in environmental planning and design at Cairo University. Currently both are pursuing master's degrees in landscape and environmental planning at the Scuola Superiore di Catania, Italy, which is funding their studies at the University of Arkansas.

A Web search introduced the couple to the Community Design Center's work: "We checked the ASLA site, and saw that the design center had won an award for Porchscapes," Youssef said. Porchscapes, the design center's "green" neighborhood for the Washington County chapter of Habitat for Humanity, won a 2008 ASLA Honor Award in Planning and Analysis from the American Society of Landscape Architects. "This kind of sustainable development is a trend that has to be pursued," he added. "It benefits not only Arkansas but all of the world."

Following a flurry of e-mails and a lot of paperwork, the couple arrived in Fayetteville and immediately immersed themselves in master planning for McArthur Park, a large project led by Conway+Schulte Architects of Minneapolis.  Read more about their planning work for McArthur Park.

The Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center, Wellesley College. Photo by Timothy Hursley, courtesy Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects.

5:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 27
Ken Shollmier Hall
(Room 103, Vol Walker Hall)

In a career spanning more than 30 years Merrill Elam and her partner, Mack Scogin, have won international acclaim for work that ranges from the sleek, low-slung utility of a 330,000-square-foot factory in Canton, Ga. for furniture maker Herman Miller to the asymmetrical exuberance of the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center for Wellesley College. Their Atlanta, Georgia-based firm, Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, has won more than 50 design awards, including six national American Institute  of Architects Awards for Excellence. Recent projects include the new United States Federal Courthouse in Austin, Texas; new student housing at Syracuse University; the Yale University Health Services Center; the Gates Center for Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University; the Knowlton School of Architecture for The Ohio State University; the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library for the University of California at Berkeley; and the Zhongkai Sheshan Villas in Shanghai, China. In addition to architecture, the firm also engages in graphic design, exhibit design, interior design, planning, programming and research.

The firm's work has been widely published in magazines and books, including the 1992 Rizzoli publication, Scogin Elam and Bray: Critical Architecture / Architectural Criticism; the 1999 University of Michigan book Mack & Merrill and the 2005 Princeton Architectural Press publication Mack Scogin Merrill Elam: Knowlton Hall.

This lecture is the 2008 Ernie Jacks Distinguished Lecture, sponsored by Witsell Evans Rasco Architects/Planners.

Read more about Merrill Elam
View lecture series schedule

P.S. Students, plan to attend the pre-lecture reception hosted by the Hnedak Bobo Group. Free pizza and drinks, 5 p.m. in the Crit Cube. The first ever winners of the Hnedak Bobo Group International Design Competition will be announced before the lecture.

Richard Renfro (B.Arch. '79) won two awards for his lighting design for the Bloch building addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Photo by Roland Halbe.

The Renfro Design Group, alumnus Richard Renfro's firm, has won four awards and citations from the Illuminating Engineering Society of New York's Lumen Awards:

• The Bloch addition to the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. won an Award of Excellence for Outdoor and an Award of Merit for Interior

• The Art Cave in Calistoga, Calif. won an Award of Merit

• The Fragonard Room at the Frick Collection in New York, NY won a Citation for the Integration of New Technology

The Acxion Corporation Central Arkansas Data Center in Little Rock, designed by Reese Rowland (B.Arch. '90) of Polk Stanley Rowland Curzon Porter Architects, was one of 66 buildings selected to win a 2008 American Architecture Award. Cosponsored by the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design, the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and Metropolitan Arts Press, the program honors outstanding buildings designed and built in the United States by firms practicing in the U.S.

Ayo teamed with Trinity Simons (B.Arch. '04) and seven other students to design a project, "Patriot Homes," that won third place in the Affordable Housing Development Competition sponsored by the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, the Boston Society of Architects, Kevin P. Martin & Associates, P.C., and Citizens' Housing and Planning Association. Their team proposed transformation of a former police station in South Boston into affordable housing for veterans. Trinity currently is pursuing a master's degree in city planning at MIT.

Congratulations, all!

Marlon Blackwell's transformation of a historic hardware store into a downtown library for Gentry, Ark. is featured in this month's Architectural Record. Photo by Timothy Hursley.

Two projects by Professor Marlon Blackwell are published in the October 2008 issue of Architectural Record, which focuses this month on “Design with Conscience.”  The Gentry Library, a 100-year-plus former hardware store that Blackwell has transformed into a social linchpin for downtown Gentry, is documented in a six-page article while his Porchdog house, a hurricane-resistant prototype, is included in a round-up article on architectural response to rebuilding the Gulf Coast, post-Katrina. View images of Gentry Library

The August 2008 issue of International New Architecture, a Japanese periodical, documented residential development, campus planning and transit study projects by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center in three lavishly illustrated articles. Steve Luoni, director of the Community Design Center, also participated in a roundtable discussion on global climate change in the current issue of Places.

Michael Hughes' TrailerWrap project is featured in the October issue of Dwell.

The wooded retreat that Lynn Fitzpatrick designed for her family in the hills west of Fayetteville is featured in the current issue of At Home in Arkansas.