Blackwell Designs Award-Winning Golf Center for Razorbacks

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Smith Razorback Golf Center

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — UA School of Architecture professor Marlon Blackwell has designed an award-winning practice facility for the Razorback golf team. His Fred and Mary Smith Razorback Golf Center, located in Johnson, Ark., has won an Honor Award from the Gulf States Regional division of the American Institute of Architects. The award is one of three chosen from a five-state area.

Jurors praised Blackwell’s design as “very compelling” and stated it was “a great place to play golf.”

The UA Razorback and Ladyback golf teams and members of the adjacent Blessings golf club will share the practice facility and golf course. Blackwell also designed the golf clubhouse, which is aligned with the practice facility to create a threshold that opens onto the Clear Creek valley golf course.

A metal farm shed, gilded by the rays of the setting sun on Blackwell’s first visit to the site, inspired the design.

“The shed has since been razed, but its qualities, I hope, are found again in its reincarnation,” Blackwell noted in a new monograph on his work, “An Architecture of the Ozarks.”

A base of mauve-streaked native stone and a copper carapace that has oxidized to a purple-brown patina enriches the building’s simple bar form.

“Most university practice facilities are very Spartan,” Blackwell said with a shrug. “We took the conventional metal building type and gave it nice detailing.”

A series of practice bays and a team meeting room with floor-to-ceiling glazing open the east side of the center to views of the verdant golf course, while offices on the west side present a more private face to nearby Highway 112. Blackwell specified double-wall construction on the western façade so that the copper skin could extend beyond the stone base.

“It’s a very simple detail but it makes all the difference,” he said. “The copper seems to float above the stone.”

Though he’s not a golfer, Blackwell says the precise moves required by the game inspired the meticulous detailing of the building. For example, construction workers used a laser to line up the ribs of the copper walls and roof.

On a recent tour of the practice facility and golf clubhouse, the latter currently under construction, Blackwell continued to sweat the details. In a lengthy bilingual transaction with construction workers, he specified the tooling of a caulk joint between the slate treads and cherry risers of the grand stair to the club.

“Every detail counts,” he said.

Blackwell’s nuanced response to the vernacular architecture of the Ozarks has helped him build an international reputation. He has won 19 AIA design awards and the 2002 ar + d international prize, and his work has been extensively documented in publications including Architecture, Arquine, A+U, Detail, Dwell, Southern Living, Architectural Record and Architectural Review. His residential projects are featured in design books including “New Country House,” “Houses of Wood,” “Private Towers,” “House: American Houses for the New Century,” “The New American House 3,” “The New American Cottage,” “40 Under 40” and “The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary Architecture.”

Blackwell teaches fifth-year design studio, technology, house culture and design detailing at the University of Arkansas School of Architecture.