Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe visits with architecture students on the back deck of the modular home they built in Fayetteville and Little Rock. Beebe spoke and helped cut the ribbon at a May 7 ceremony in Little Rock. (Photo by Michelle Parks.)

The architecture students had two main parameters when designing the home: It had to fit through the doors of the warehouse where they'd spend months building it, and it had to glide easily through the Bobby Hopper Tunnel.

Fifteen fourth- and fifth-year architecture students designed and built a modular home in the PreFab Landscapes studio, led by Michael Hughes, an associate professor in the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas. The project was done in collaboration with the Downtown Little Rock Community Development Corp. and mentors from the design and construction professions. It's the first of several homes planned in this partnership between the school and the Little Rock group, a nonprofit organization focused on community revitalization.

Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe and G. David Gearhart, chancellor of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, were among the speakers at the May 7 ribbon-cutting ceremony at the home, 1519 S. Commerce St., in Little Rock. It is located on a corner lot in the Pettaway Park neighborhood, an area south of MacArthur Park heavily damaged by a 1999 tornado.

Hughes said this type of full-scale experience is an important component to design education. This studio project challenged the students to maintain the rigor and clarity of their design intentions while also dealing with the challenges and pressures of bringing the concept to reality.

"It allows them to see all the complexity required to complete a piece of architecture. Where most design studios focus on the macro scale of schematic design -- to some degree in a bubble, without other variables or contingencies affecting the project -- with this, design is one component of the overall puzzle that makes architecture come to life," Hughes said.

The ribbon-cutting ceremony came one day before several of the students who worked on the house graduated from the school at commencement ceremonies in Fayetteville. Students who worked on the project were Lianne Collier, Jack Doherty, Kevin Hayre, Kelly Jackson, Nicholas Walker, Bradley West and Ryan Wojcicki (all fifth-year students), and Benjamin Bendall, Addison Bliss, Stephenie Foster, Josh Matthews, Elizabeth Phillips, Chase Pitner, James Swann and Jerome Tomlin (all fourth-year students). Others who helped were third-year students Enrique Colcha Chavarrea, Long Dinh, Cesar Larrain Vaca, Michael Lyons and William Masino, and first-year student Eric Hobbs.

(Click here to find out more about this design experience, and to see a slideshow of the project.)

The linear development of northwest Arkansas could make it a national model for rail development in rural metropolitan regions. This UACDC comparison image shows downtown Springdale as it now looks and as it could look with increased urban density.

A study regarding light-rail transit was one of seven projects to win a 2010 Great Places Award from the Environmental Design Research Association.

"Visioning Rail Transit in Northwest Arkansas 2030," which won for planning, was created by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and Fay Jones School of Architecture, as well as Washington University in St. Louis and its Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. The place-planning awards recognize projects that make proposals for the future design, use or management of a place.

This winning study is an advocacy-planning document envisioning smart growth development through rail transit at the regional scale. It represents five years of research, grassroots advocacy and planning studies by a consortium of design professionals, educators and students led by the Community Design Center, an outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture.

It looked at a highway-dominated region that is also home to major corporations that depend on transportation logistics: Wal-Mart Stores, Tyson Foods and J.B. Hunt Transport Services. Prior to the economic downturn, this was the nation's sixth-fastest growing region, with the population of 350,000 expected to double within the next 15 years.

The study was intended to prompt local governments to fund a $2 million feasibility study to revive the existing rail corridor as a light-rail system. The larger planning goal is to spur the anticipated growth toward urban options that are presently underutilized and culturally devalued, said Steve Luoni, director of the Community Design Center.

"This is much easier to do than some would think and, more than anything else, leverages the livability and economic advantages already in northwest Arkansas," Luoni said.

The 13th annual Great Places Awards were co-sponsored with Places, a peer-reviewed journal, in cooperation with Metropolis magazine. Awards will be presented at the annual EDRA meeting in June in Washington, D.C. Winning projects and commentary will be published in Places.

(Click here to read the full story.)

Graduates of the Fay Jones School of Architecture clap during the May 8 commencement ceremony as they recognize their friends and family members in the audience who supported them during their education. (Photo by Michelle Parks.)

The 2010 commencement ceremony for the Fay Jones School of Architecture was held May 8 at the Arkansas Union Ballroom.

Degrees were awarded by Dean Jeff Shannon; Ethel Goodstein-Murphree, associate dean; Marlon Blackwell, head of the architecture department; and Mark Boyer, head of the landscape architecture department.

Robert Jackson, a landscape architecture student, addressed the students. Jackson was the class of 2010 senior scholar, the graduating senior with the highest grade-point average (a 3.96).

James Richards, principal and co-founder of Townscape Inc. in Fort Worth, Texas, presented the graduate address. He's also the president-elect of the school's Professional Advisory Board. H. Terry Rasco (B.Arch. 1971), principal and executive chairman of Witsell, Evans, Rasco Architects/Planners in Little Rock, presented an alumni welcome to the graduates. Rasco has been elected to the national American Institute of Architects' College of Fellows and has received the AIA Arkansas' Fay Jones Gold Medal for a lifetime of "excellence of design, leadership and service" to the state of Arkansas.

A reception followed in the second-floor gallery of Vol Walker Hall, where graduates and their friends and families mingled, talked with faculty and looked at design work created during the 2009-10 school year.

A month earlier, on April 7, architecture school students were awarded nearly $105,000 in scholarships at the annual Honors Recognition Banquet at the Clarion Inn in Fayetteville. Speakers there included Elizabeth Jones and Addison Pritchard. Jones, a graduating honors architecture student, won the national American Institute of Architects Henry Adams Medal, the Mort Karp Medal and the C. Murray Smart Medal. Pritchard, then a third-year landscape architecture student, won a Verna C. Garvan Traveling Scholarship and a John G. Williams Traveling Fellowship and was a new member of Sigma Lambda Alpha, the national honor society for landscape architecture students.

Congratulations to all honorees and graduates!

Fallingwater, designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, was built in the late 1930s. Officials have solicited designs for new cottages to be built on the Pennsylvania property. (Photo source: www.commons.wikimedia.org)

It's a tall order, to design cottages on the site of Fallingwater, the famous home designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

But architect Marlon Blackwell is up for the challenge.

Fallingwater is downhill and not visible from the mountaintop meadow site planned for the cottages, which will be used for education programs. Rather than try to compete with or emulate Fallingwater, Blackwell's firm chose to rely on its own basic design principles.

"I think the key to how we approached this was not to try to make overt comparisons to it, but really just try to do what we do best, which is respond to ideas about place and material and think about how something is used," Blackwell said. "That's how we approached it, rather than trying to make Wright the reference for everything, but nonetheless to be inspired by his principles."

Blackwell's Fayetteville firm, Marlon Blackwell Architect, was one of six architectural firms in the United States and Canada chosen to submit a design for the juried Architectural Design Competition of Ideas. Blackwell is a professor and head of the architecture department in the Fay Jones School of Architecture.

In 1991, members of the American Institute of Architects voted Fallingwater "the best all-time work of American architecture." It was built in 1936-38 for Edgar Kaufmann, a Pittsburgh department store owner, and used as a retreat for his family. The home, located near Mill Run, Pa., southeast of Pittsburgh, was entrusted to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963. The site for the proposed six cottages is north of Fallingwater on the Bear Run Nature Reserve.

Design submissions from Blackwell and the other five selected firms will be exhibited June 12 through Aug. 29 at the Heinz Architectural Center, part of the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh. The jury will select a winning entry, as well as second- and third-place entries.

(Click here to read more.)

Korydon Smith's research regarding the equity of housing for the elderly and the disabled in the South is now in print.

Just Below the Line: Disability, Housing, and Equity in the South was released this month by the University of Arkansas Press. This is the first book to come from the cross-campus collaboration between the UA Press and the Fay Jones School of Architecture.

Smith, an associate professor of architecture, coauthored the book with Jennifer Webb and Brent T. Williams, associate professors of interior design and rehabilitation, respectively, at the University of Arkansas.

All publications released under this imprint will be designated by a special logo, which features Fay Jones' Thorncrown Chapel.

Alumni, do you have news to share?

Have you:

• landed a new job

• wrapped up an interesting project

• won a prize or otherwise been honored

• or been out of touch for a while?

We want to hear from you -- and share your news with the world (or, at least, the 3,000+ alumni and friends who read Re:View magazine). We're planning the fall 2010 issue, and we want to include you.

Please send your latest news to Michelle Parks by June 14. If you've got some high-res, print-quality images of your work (at least 300 dpi) we'd like to see those too.

We look forward to hearing from you!