Blackwell's Fallingwater Cottages Design Wins Honor Award From Boston Society of Architects

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This design for the Cottages at Fallingwater, by Marlon Blackwell Architect, has won a 2011 Honor Award for Unbuilt Architecture and Design from the Boston Society of Architects.

Marlon Blackwell Architect’s design for the Cottages at Fallingwater has won a 2011 Honor Award for Unbuilt Architecture and Design from the Boston Society of Architects. The awards were announced at a banquet held Thursday in Boston.

The design was for cottages to be located on the site of Fallingwater, the famous home designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Fallingwater is downhill and not visible from the mountaintop meadow site planned for the cottages, intended for use by education programs.

This design arrived after Blackwell’s Fayetteville firm was one of six architectural firms chosen to submit a design for the Architectural Design Competition of Ideas.

Blackwell is a Distinguished Professor and head of the architecture department in the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas.

The Boston Society of Architects jury called the project “easy to fall in love with.”

“While respectful of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, it maintains its own rigor and language. The jury felt the presentation was wonderful and renamed the project Falling Prairie because of the carefully placed cottages anchored to the rise in the meadow. Could this project have a more organic relationship to the site? A comment from the jury questioned if the column on the long porch was tenable – would Frank Lloyd Wright allow it? The project is quiet, elemental and exquisite.”

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 cottages is north of Fallingwater on the Bear Run Nature Reserve.

Blackwell and Jonathan Boelkins, a project manager and designer in his firm, arrived at the design concept for the cottages during a visit to the Fallingwater site two winters ago. They contemplated how to position six separate buildings on the site. Boelkins suggested spreading them across the field, in a series, like a threshold between forest and field, and with a panoramic view of the Allegheny Mountains beyond.

As they pressed their hands into the snow-covered ground, creating a pattern of indentions representing the dwellings, they had their plan.

In Blackwell’s design, the cottages are embedded in the ground, not unlike the position of Fallingwater in the rock, where it rests above a waterfall. The contrasting concepts of water and fire also appealed to Blackwell, and he likens the serial pattern of the cottages to the coke ovens used historically in Pennsylvania to turn coal into fuel for steel production.

In this design’s creation, Blackwell also thought of a quote by Wright in which he described organic architecture as “buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground.”

With that deep connection to place, Blackwell employed materials of the place. The detail of one cottage shows an entryway made of Pennsylvania slate, “of the earth” as it descends into the ground, while grass continues onto the roof. Local hardwoods harvested and milled on site are used for the walls and for the screen that filters light from a skylight. The southern wall made from stacked cordwood protects from the harsh sun, while the northern wall of glass welcomes in sunlight.

The jury for the 2011 Unbuilt Architecture and Design awards program received 88 entries, a diverse and eclectic group of projects that blurred the line between urban design, landscape architecture and architecture. Eleven of those entries were selected for awards or citations.

“Some projects were selected because of their simple elegance while others took on real design challenges addressing issues of adaptive reuse or urban land utilization,” the society’s website states. “While sustainability was a buzzword several years ago, zero energy was a common theme this year. If there is a common thread to be found in the selected projects, it was their ability to address design issues on multiple levels.”

Established in 1867, the Boston Society of Architects is a chapter of the American Institute of Architects. It consists of more than 3,500 members and produces a diverse array of programs and publications, including ABX (ArchitectureBoston Expo) and ArchitectureBoston. The group is committed to professional development for our members, advocacy on behalf of great design, and sharing an appreciation for the built environment with the public at large.