We are based in Seattle, WA.
Organized by a handful of volunteers and registered as a not-for-profit organization, Space.City is an independent architectural group.
Our focus and purpose is to inspirit a dialogue among architects, artists, and others involved in the culture of our city.
As an information hub for Seattle's architectural community and to keep our community active, Space.City maintains an email list to communicate local arts and architecture events. By this network we support Seattle's other architectural groups and design organizations -- A:BC (Action Better City), AIA and AIGA, Cornish, DocoMomo, Henry Gallery and other museums, Suyama Space and other alternative galleries, Seattle Architecture Foundation, and UW School of Architecture. We welcome new members and encourage involvement. Subscription is free. Join us.
Space.City has a ten year history of hosting architectural lectures and other cultural events in Seattle. Since our formation in 1997, Space.City has presented talks by more than a dozen artists and architects whose ideas and contributions cover the spectrum of creative and critical thinking today. The colorful list includes Anderson Anderson, Tadao Ando, Cecil Balmond, Shigeru Ban, Gunther Behnisch, Alison Brooks, Yung Ho Chang, Brad Cloepfil, Xaveer DeGeyter, Rafael Fajardo, Luis Fernandez-Galiano, Vincent James, Carlos Jimenez, Bjarke Ingels of BIG, Toyo Ito, Mathias Klotz, Daniel Libeskind, Greg Lynn, Eric Owen Moss, Anthony Pellecchia, Gaetano Pesche, Jesse Reiser, Michael Riedijk, Lindy Roy, Brigitte Shim, Werner Sobek, John Stamets, Jarmund Vigsnaes, and William Zahner. We have also hosted numerous informal discussion 'salons', three urban design forum with Seattle's former mayor Paul Schell, and two panel style symposia, "Libraries of the Future" and "Surrogate Bodies".
Space.City works in partnership with Suyama Space. We thank Peter Miller Books, Greg Bishop, NBBJ and Naramore Foundation, Washington State Arts Commission, Seattle Arts Commission, 4Culture, and the Allen Foundation for the Arts for their continued support.
Space.City, Seattle's Art and Architecture Forum, presents a lecture by Marlon Balckwell on Tuesday May 6, 2008 at 6:30 pm in Seattle Central Library Auditurium
Lecture tickets are available for $10 at Peter Miller Architecture and Design Books, 1st and Virginia in Seattle. Tickets are available via brownpapertickets.comTickets will be $15 at the door.
“For Blackwell, buildings are generators of and frames for experience. Profound and touching architectural experiences arise from the tectonic realities of construction, truthful materiality, and the existential charge of the imagery, not from fictitious pictorial fabrications.” - Juhani Pallasmaa
Marlon Blackwell’s work is born out of a goal to enrich the experience of the everyday world by simply ‘building well’. The firm seeks to provide their clients an architecture that can be felt as much as it is understood, as immediate and tactile as it is legible, contributing to the fundamental civic dignity of communities. Working from a conviction that architecture is larger than the subject of architecture, Blackwell looks at the world with a microscopic wide-angle lens to generate ideas and actions from concrete experiences of the everyday, between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between one’s own personal history and the history of the discipline of architecture. For his Seattle lecture, Blackwell will discuss his design work as interplay between details, form, and place, challenging the conventions and models that often blind us to other possibilities.
Blackwell is an architect based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He received his undergraduate degree from Auburn University in 1980 and Master of Architecture II degree from Syracuse University in Florence, in 1991. Work produced from his private practice, Marlon Blackwell Architect, has received national and international recognition through AIA design awards and numerous architectural publications including Architecture, A+U, Architectural Record and Architectural Review. In 1998, the Architectural League of New York recognized Blackwell as an “Emerging Voice” in architecture. In April 2005, Princeton Architectural Press published a monograph of his work entitled “An Architecture of the Ozarks: The Works of Marlon Blackwell”.
A tenured professor at the University of Arkansas, Blackwell teaches fifth-year design studio, technology, and design detailing. He has served as visiting professor at MIT, Syracuse University, Washington University in St. Louis, Middlebury College, and is currently the Paul Rudolph Visiting Professor at Auburn University. Blackwell co-founded the University of Arkansas’ Mexico Summer Urban Studio, in 1994, and has coordinated and taught in the program at the Casa Luis Barragan in Mexico City since 1996.
