Carson Michaelis
E092 // W01 → Siting Blackwell’s St. Nicholas, or: A Decorated, Well-did Shed
Fall 2022
Elective Course - Modernity, Architecture and the Environment
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Professor Bárbara Maçães Costa
The following is my final paper, with both graphics created by me and images sources from online. The course asks each student to select a personally meaningful building and use one of the various modernist enviornmental discourse frameworks from lectures to situate the building theoretically.
Siting Blackwell’s St. Nicholas, or: A Decorated, Well-did Shed
1. Developing a Region
The crack of a baseball against a child’s bat and a neighbour’s dog barking at its own shadow provide a moment’s relief from the endless drone of cars shuffling down the interstate. Only a block away, hidden behind a row of megachurches and warehouses, the ribbon of concrete and headlights do not need to be seen to be felt. Despite its endless noise, the road encouraged construction of the neighborhoods alongside it, often in ways suburban residents cannot understand. It turns out that the fast lane allows for much more than a quick drive between home and a 10 o’clock Thursday morning Pilates session, its presence also allows for an endless expansion of the city’s edge. Before long the sound of the interstate is gone altogether. A diesel truck jacked up on meter- tall tires has filled the air with clouds of smoke, and the engine hums a deep growl as it rolls down the road. As it passes, the plants on a neighbour’s front porch shake. Maybe those potted Areca Palms know this feeling, having long ago felt the same deep growl of a tiger as it moved along the floor of the jungle. The old predators are gone though, and we have only ourselves to contend with in this new turf-loaded, vinyl-clad, concrete-paved jungle.
To the truck’s left sit a line of megachurches and mega-warehouses, along with their equally mega parking lots. To the right are a row of houses so similar that had they not been numbered, one might walk into a neighbor’s living room one day by accident. Maybe we should just take the numbers off, facilitating that neighborly interaction we’ve been searching for in the American suburbs for decades anyhow. Both sides of that street exemplify not the America that long ago was promised, but is instead a reflection of the America that has prospered. Those patriotic victories at Normandy and Midway today mean little when compared to the sweeping American success at Levittown that succeeded them.
It is often clear that areas like these are seen as a place for neither architectural craft nor intellectual intent, instead preferring efficiency and approachability. The wide lawns and dead-end roads are spaces ruled by an architecture of economy and convenience. Hundreds of thousands of identical plats across the country will be altered by developers, contractors, and rubber-stamp architects each year; and as long as there is money to be made, there will be fighting over the one lucky enough to make it. In places like this, few architects whose names wish to be known or taught will ever work. But, amongst the building and fighting, the interstate’s drone and truck’s growl, and the mega-churches and warehouses, one architect has made himself worth knowing, and his efforts have garnered international attention.
Situated in the low hills between the two ranges of the Ozark Mountains is the office of Marlon Blackwell. Once a magnificent range, an eon of erosion has turned the Ozarks into no more than a collection of rocky nubs and valleys covered with a thick green blanket of Shortleaf Pine and White Oak. In a narrow strip between the Ozarks’ two main mountain ranges lie the rolling hills of the Springfield Plateau, whose endless creeks and rivers rush Eastward between the slopes, seeking the Mighty Mississippi. With seemingly fertile soil and few trees, it offered an answer for those early American settlers whose lust for Manifest Destiny called them West. Small towns once littered these hills, and their edges slowly faded into a countryside dominated by poultry farming and struggling corn fields. In the past century though, things have changed. Three Fortune 500 companies have since formed their own range of monetary mountains within these hills, and are quickly replacing the remaining farmland with the endless swell of new housing that they need to keep growing. As the companies and their host cities began their rapid expansion in the late twentieth century, they swallowed the hills whole. Invasion came first by the new gas stations and warehouses that often signal the edge of a Midwestern town, and were soon followed by the liquor stores and cheap condos that moved in beside them. Before long single family suburban housing blanketed the rest. Now, the once agrarian hills have been gutted, gridded, and garrisoned with a new generation of god-fearing Americans.
The list of architects who use their work as a way to fight against this local urban sprawl is endless, but Blackwell stands firm in his acceptance of the new reality. Instead of posing as a martyr fighting against the seemingly unstoppable force of capitalism, he works within it. Often designing for clients with challengingly low budgets, his ingenuity comes through both structural simplification and aesthetic abstraction, allowing for an architecture which engages with the character of the existing site, while still retaining an outwardly optimistic self-awareness.
To do so he leans on a long line of architects whose work has provided a deep well of ideas to inspire his own. Being neither Midwestern nor Southern, the mountains and hills of Northwest Arkansas are filled with a variety of building types devised long ago or in places far away, left to fester between the oak and pine unquestioned for over a century. Plantation and shotgun houses, mobile homes, mini-mansions, strip malls, farmhouses, and RV parks often mark to the learned local what type of person lives within, who they vote for, and where they work. In such a disparate place there is still architectural potential, but few have been able to see it, and even fewer have been able to see it realized. The last architect to do so was E. Fay Jones, AIA Gold Medal winner and namesake of the school of architecture at Arkansas University in Fayetteville, where Blackwell has been teaching since 1992.
IMAGES HERE!!!
THEN MAPPINGS!!!
THEN MORE IMAGES!!!
2. Developing a Regional Style
After graduating from Rice University with a master’s degree in architecture, Jones became a professor at the University of Oklahoma and mentee of the program’s chairman Bruce Goff, who practiced his own unique form of organicism. Driven by his love for the Viennese Secession, Goff combined their architectural use of mosaics, detailing, and ornamentation with the Native American motifs and forms he found while living on the Oklahoma prairie. After spending two years under Goff, Jones was offered a Taliesin Fellowship, which sparked a new mentorship under Frank Lloyd Wright that would last for decades. Soon, he returned to Arkansas to begin a practice of his own; and to teach at the University of Arkansas, where he slowly fell in love with the Arcadian landscape and lifestyle present in the countryside around North-west Arkansas’ growing cities. Despite a love for the rural, commissions often came in the form of family homes in suburban or exurban sites, forcing him to adapt to the growing environment.
Regardless of location, Jones was driven by the desire to create an architecture organized by the experiences of its inhabitants. He aspired to build places which would be neither pompous nor ordinary, but which felt at once both unique and humble. To do it, he applied the principles of organic architecture practiced by both Wright and Goff, who had often interpreted the same ideas to create buildings that preferred attention to humility. Instead of seeking attention of his own, Jones receded to the place he knew best and began developing a quiet regionalism which has defined Ozark architecture ever since. His style embodied a language of resolution, clarity, and precision, made possible through the practice of self limitation and thematic iteration.
The development of the Ozark style can be reduced to a method not significantly different from the one which Goff used to develop his organicism. Jones first looked to the tectonics, verticality, and rhythm of Gothic architecture in the High Middle Ages and adapted it to the Ozarks through the use of Usonian construction and materiality inspired by Wright. Jones’ work was dominated by the presence of exposed wooden beams and trusses, often only revealed when overhead. This allowed for the public areas within the house to exist free of spatial partitions, letting the program develop below the trusses of the roof, not dissimilar from a series of clearings beneath a forest canopy. His relatively simple ideas and clear self imposed limitations allowed for the iteration, development, and mastery of his own style, a kind in which he said “I would not be at all distressed if I could only use a simple gable roof, post and beam, and the simple rectangle for the rest of my life.”
All three elements are on full display in his 1980 Thorncrown Chapel, the Ozarks’ only canonical structure. Standing tall on a sylvan hillside, Jones’ simple chapel is uniquely regional in both form and detail, but remains in dialogue with Usonian and Gothic precedents. Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, Lloyd Wright’s 1951 Wayfarers Chapel and the Parisian thirteenth-century church of Sainte-Chapelle are explicit influences on the design, but have been combined into a structure belonging unmistakably to both Jones and the Ozarks. Believing in principle over formal imitation separated Jones from other disciples of Wright, giving him the ability to draw from the local vernacular in its carpenter dominated tradition, forming the new style in Northwest Arkansas.
IMAGES!!!
MORE IMAGES!!!
3. Re-developing a Regional Style
The importance of Fay Jones’ work is not through proximity alone, but its inspiration for Blackwell, who has taken ideas laid out to define the Ozark style and manipulated them into tools of his own. The repeated element most noticeable in Blackwell’s work is the importance of the section. For a place where buildings are often flat, long, and low, both he and Jones use primarily section to define building profiles and interior spaces. While Blackwell claims to have stumbled upon his love of profile from his time as an aspiring cartoonist, it is clear that the sectional rhythm prominent in the works of Jones have been revived as a new, more dynamic force driving Blackwell’s practice. Early works such as the Moore HoneyHouse, BarnHouse, and BullFrog Prototype House are each derived from a scheme where, to Corbusier’s displeasure, the section is the generator. These new forms “of the Ozarks” have come far from the rectangular plans and gable roofs which Jones loved so dearly. Now, they operate as dynamic, often even zoomorphic forms, challenging again what it means to be both contextual and local.
Blackwell has not forgotten his time outside the Ozarks though, and his years spent studying at Auburn and Syracuse both reveal themselves in the materiality, playfulness, and flexibility he exercises as a practitioner. As opposed to ideas originating from Wright, characterized in the work of Blackwell through a series of linear syntheses from Jones and others, the non-regional ideas present in his practice reveal themselves to be a reaction to the discourse on Critical Regionalism, particularly that which was outlined by Frampton in 1983.7 I would like to propose that instead of classifying Blackwell as one of the many regionalists following the rules laid out by Frampton, he stands closer to the Liberative Regionalism defined by Harwell Hamilton Harris, whose 1954 lecture “Liberative and Restrictive Regionalism” served as inspiration for Frampton’s own writings.8 This distinction may seem small, but it separates the work of many American regionalists such as Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio, Lake Flato, and Marlon Blackwell from the more formal regionalism introduced by Frampton and Juhani Pallasmaa, which manifested itself in the generation before, especially in those outside of rural North America.
The distinction between Critical Regionalism and Liberative Regionalism comes mainly through the seriousness in which architects interpret their surroundings and subsequently build within. In a discourse dominated by the fight between modern and postmodern, Frampton saw a third option available to the architect. Instead of sticking to the global homogenization that came alongside modernism or what he saw as the superficial ideas dominant in postmodernism, it was possible to create a collection of individual styles separate from both. To do this he called eagerly for architects to subscribe to a set of processes, not products, which would enable them to develop and reinforce a new series of localized regionalisms. Harris instead viewed regionalism as a unique local architecture that could be of two types, Restrictive and Liberative. The former exemplified by that which preserves or retains a dialect specific to a place, and the latter being distinguished by new and varied architectural expressions existing within a region. The call to action by Frampton was heeded in places such as Europe, where the homogeneity of modernization left little room for expression, but in regions such as the Ozarks, following an “architecture of resistance” could only enable a resistance against the capitalist vernacular.
The Bible and Sun Belts of America uniquely allow for contemporary formations of Harris’ Liberative Regionalisms due to their lack of widespread permanent habitation before colonization swept through the landscape. Precolonial styles often became fleeting memories, and were redefined in the first few generations of colonial settlement. This means for those now working in the area, expression of what is regional may either draw upon memories, or the capital-driven vernacular styles laid out by local architects before them. For Goff, Jones, and subsequently Blackwell, creation came by way of expression through invention, as opposed to Frampton’s want for a distillation of existing local ideas, which often define the work of regionalism elsewhere. The beloved Bagsvaerd Church of Utzon, for example, is as much a reinterpretation of the Chinese Pagoda as it is a critical re-evaluation of the modernist concrete molds which defined the church’s context.
While anyone can draw on ideas from afar, many parts of America were not receptive to the modernism that Frampton calls on those to critique locally. This quality separates architects like Utzon from the late Sam Mockbee, whose Southern regionalism emerged from his informal and playful approach to construction in northern Mississippi.10 A place consumed by capitalism, it remains isolated from the modernism that flourished in Europe and the American coasts throughout the early and middle of the Twentieth Century. In this place, form is often generated through a series of improvisations, whose lack of choreography is the exact thing which makes them so uniquely regional. Mockbee understood this, and used it as a method by which to both teach students to design and construct, all while remaining a true member of the impoverished communities around him. His legacy succeeds him today in the regional prevalence of valley roofs, improvised materials, and dogtrot houses.
Blackwell’s version of this Liberative Regionalism reveals itself through typological challenges made to the abstracted capitalist symbols such as a house, trailer, shop, or church. While the majority of his work has been in new construction, the one which challenges typology best in its critique of the modern Ozarks is his 2010 St. Nicholas’s Orthodox Church. Approached by a local congregation of Eastern Orthodox worshipers who were then meeting in a dimly lit strip mall, Blackwell aspired to stretch their budget to create something special. He recounts nearly a decade later, “And I said you don’t want to do something like this,” pointing to a trio of typical corrugated metal churches, “Here’s the adventures of religious architecture in Northwest Arkansas.”11 [Figs. 20–23] His keen awareness of context and the desire of many to replicate it allow him to argue for what he sees as buildings that improve on the existing typology without needing to completely replace them.
The obvious conclusion any non-Ozark architect might make is that these structures have neither the form nor materiality to ever be considered a church, but Blackwell took an entirely different approach. After the congregation bought a three acre lot at the edge of town with an old house and small metal welding shed on site, they were left with a budget of just $100 per square foot to build a church for a congregation of up to 200 people. Across the street sat a line of three megachurches, each with their own metal siding and pitched roofs. Behind them ran Interstate 49, the main artery connecting the region. Undeterred by the lack of money, the church asked if he would be able to design something including the old metal welding shed. “And I started praying, you know. I mean what to do?”12 What came next was nothing short of perfect. Blackwell decided to wrap the existing metal structure with his own box-ribbed panels, and added just a 10-inch hall in front of the existing building.
The church still faced programmatic problems though. The North-South axis would act best as the nave, but Orthodox Christians prefer to pray facing the East, requiring the central axis to span the width of the shed rather than its length. To accommodate for this, the addition became the required narthex, and connects the two garage bays turned sanctuary to the two bays turned office and gathering space. For Blackwell, the materiality, size, and location were not inhibitions on the shed becoming a church. He believed that what was needed to transform the space into something more meaningful was as simple as the implementation of proportion and scale. Their use would be a cost free method of both elevating the church into a meaningful space, while also referencing the same principles which have been used in successfully designed Orthodox churches since their beginnings.
Like Blackwell’s other projects, use of scale and proportion happen almost all in section and elevation, especially as the plan of the building was constrained far more by its cramped program. On the exterior, the building acts as a billboard, operating by the same rules Venturi and Scott Brown famously defined for any building deemed the postmodern opposite of literal “duck.” The simple front facade can be seen easily from the interstate, indicating clearly through the red cross on the raised portion of the roof exactly what happens inside. It does so not through a formal expression of function, as dictated by orthodox modernism, but by adding a decorative sign to a banal shed. The sequence through the new narthex contains an extreme compression, followed by passage through the same cross bearing towering space, which bathes the walls in red morning light. Once inside the nave, a series of concealed clerestory windows on the Eastern wall allow for indirect light to flood the altar each morning.
The project also puts on display some of the improvisational detailing skills architects in rural America often need. Blackwell understood that the church would not have the budget to afford a dome above the nave, which is necessary for the congregation to pray. Taking a page out of Mockbee’s playbook, Blackwell traded two cases of beer for an unused rusty satellite dish from a local friend. The dish was then suspended from the roof of the original shed, plastered, and painted with iconography of Christ the Almighty. Can lights from the original structure were also reused both indoors and out to save on costs. Together, the ideas and elements, each with their own story, form an extremely simple building.[Fig. 24] Yet, in its simplicity there exists a refined program and clear aesthetic unity between the church’s context and function. This is the new architecture of the Ozarks, born of organicists and postmodern theoreticians, from which Blackwell has formed his own synthesis.
As his practice has grown though, it poses an interesting question to future architects: Has the Liberative regionalism that defined the great architects of the American Sun and Bible Belts gone? As the notoriety of local firms in often overlooked regions grows, the size of their offices and number of commissions grow along with them. Often finding themselves designing farther and farther from home, many have become less tied to place and craft, favoring instead high dollar commissions and a more universally accepted aesthetic. Architects like Rick Joy, Marlon Blackwell, Rural Studio, Lake Flato, Wendell Burnette, Miller Hull Partnership, and many others have each for one reason or another slowly abandoned the local architecture that once shaped their practices. They may be signalling that the time of the American regionalist has passed, or at least until another wave of contemporary criticism spreads across the discipline.
MORE IMAGES!!!
EVEN MORE IMAGES!!!
Sources?