University of Arkansas Community Design Center, Slow Street: A New Town Center for Mayflower, 2015. Views north and south from Market District.

Arkansas is often characterized as a poor state of small towns, and many of these have diminishing financial resources and escalating challenges for citizens. Southeast Arkansas’s Mississippi River delta towns are fading and torn, their modest vernacular buildings in slow décollage. Poverty is prevalent and hunger too common, but a spirit of generosity persists amidst the scarcity created as the mechanization of agriculture has taken command.
The karst topography of the Ozark Plateau, the water-soluble northwest Arkansas landscape of thin soil and scruffy forest over limestone and dolomite, was formed by the deposition of remnants of life in an ocean found here before its waters receded more than 300 million years ago. A natural merzbau, the landscape is best understood in profile and section, from the caverns and cavities carved by acidic subsurface water to the geological profile of Hawksbill Crag. Many species endemic today have evolved through a few million years in the splash of fresh water that remains, including the endangered Ozark Hellbender, a remarkable large salamander suffering acutely in a more toxic world. One elusive Ivory-billed Woodpecker, assumed to be extinct, may have been spotted recently in the Arkansas Delta and quickly became an Arkansas icon. Both are indicator species for a natural world in decline.
Though approximations of an idyllic setting may still be found in Arkansas, including the largest contiguous wilderness area in the lower forty-eight states, there is much to regret in the rapidly diminishing space between towns and in landscapes increasingly squeezed by more and more highways, streets, and roads. The state of nature has been compromised by the self-interest and civic indifference of big boxes, fast food restaurants, strip malls of every possible variety, hotels, motels, expansive automobile dealerships, payday lenders, and the predictable things representing almost all possible forms of commercial detritus that have accumulated in the post-war years. This is our milieu. This is where we work through positive acts of resistance.
Threaded throughout the projects illustrated here are demonstrations of the place-based education of the Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design and the University of Arkansas, in support of the authentic and contemporary culture of Arkansas. “Building:Community” describes the reciprocity of practice and service in the complementary (sometimes collaborative) work of Marlon Blackwell Architects and the University of Arkansas Community Design Center (UACDC), directed by Stephen Luoni. Blackwell and Luoni are both professors in the Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design. Our educational ambitions and pedagogical foundations reflect the presence and place, time and purposefulness of our students and the citizens of our state.
The definition and health of professions may be estimated by their ability to provide services, create civic dignity, and produce public goods: the ennoblement of architecture at its best, certainly, and clean water, waste management, education, public health, infrastructure, and such as well. We embrace our responsibilities for the ordinary and the everyday things that elevate fundamental qualities of life for the protection of nature and production of culture. Evidence of our efforts in response is presented here.