Marc Manack and Frank Jacobus to Present 'SILO AR&D' Lecture on Jan. 23

Timothy Hursley

The Mood Ring House, located in Fayetteville, 2015.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Marc Manack and Frank Jacobus will present a lecture at 5 p.m. Monday, Jan. 23, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville, as part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design lecture series.

Jacobus and Manack are principals of SILO AR&D, an architecture, research and design practice that currently operates out of Cleveland, Ohio, Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Charlotte, North Carolina. The firm is at work on residential and institutional projects across the United States. Its work has been featured by The Wall Street Journal, Architect, the Architect's Newspaper, Azure, Slate and Fast Company, among many others.

The firm's architecture has been recognized nationally and internationally with design awards, including those from the American Institute of Architects. In 2016, SILO was selected as an Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York, a prestigious competition that recognizes significant bodies of realized work and considers accomplishments within the design and academic communities. 

In their lecture, titled "SILO AR&D," Jacobus and Manack will explore the firm's recent work. This architecture, research and design practice is simultaneously involved in professional and academic activities. Their work deliberately engages a variety of contexts, clients and communities.

What unifies the work is the belief that through engaging practice — the comprehensive process of designing and constructing architecture — their discipline finds its imagination, defines its limits and techniques, and interprets its cultural production. Their work embraces the coincidental and competing interactions of discipline and practice, desire and capacity, control and lack thereof.

They render these complexities and contradictions explicit in their work through the projection of architecture's loftiest ambitions and lowest obligations. They embrace the field's inherent polarity as a means to liberate new forms and qualities that maintain a relevant and passionate connection with a public they help lead. Their work is the hybrid energy of two partners committed to an updated notion of the difficult whole.

Their sensibility emerges out of where they work: in the middle of the United States. They haven't had the luxury of luxury, but refuse to over-romanticize their regionalism or use it as a crutch. They instead embrace it as work ethic. They continually attempt to understand source material as places of origin in our work, and search for ways to express it.

They approach architecture as a social act that can construct diverse audiences through diverse appearances. As such, their work is preoccupied with exploring the fundamentals of architectural presence through the effects of appearance, reappearance, and disappearance. They view the architectural act of becoming visible as a form of theatre, a performance born of energy harnessed from collaborative authorship with the public and their environments.

SILO enacts this approach through architectural commissions with the ambition to stimulate interaction, discourse, and collaboration with both our clients and the community. In order to maximize engagement with the public, they believe architecture should be qualitatively rich, with vividly distinct characters that are revealed through changes in time, occupation, and event. Rather than operate with the traditional architectural ideal of monolithic concepts that are doggedly carried through all aspects of the project, their work consistently looks to nest multiple distinct architectures within each project to create a versatile architecture of persistent vitality and changing presence.

Manack, AIA, is also the assistant professor of building design at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has taught previously at the Fay Jones School, Kent State University College of Architecture and Environmental Design, and Ohio State University's Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture, from where he is also a graduate.

Jacobus is also an associate professor and the 21st Century Chair of Building Technologies in the Fay Jones School. He taught previously at the University of Idaho. He has a Bachelor of Architecture from the Cooper Union and a Master​ of Architecture from the University of Texas. While in Austin, he was invited to exhibit at the Venice Biennale for a project titled "Resilient Foundations: The Gulf Coast after Katrina." He is author Archi-Graphic: An Infographic Look at Architecture (Laurence King), and The Visual Biography of Color (ORO Editions).

This is the Kappa Sigma Lecture in honor of Fay Jones.

Continuing education credits for this lecture will be pursued through the AIA.

The public is invited to attend. Admission is free, with limited seating.

For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or fayjones.uark.edu/.