An Architect’s View of Privacy

Marlon Blackwell is the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture and a Distinguished Professor in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He’s earned many awards, including the 2020 AIA Gold Medal, which is the highest honor awarded by the American Institute of Architects (AIA). In addition to being a full-time faculty member, he is also the founder and the principal at Marlon Blackwell Architects (MBA), based in Fayetteville Arkansas. His lecture on “architectural privacy” was the most popular in the University of Arkansas Honors course on privacy. We interviewed him in June of 2023 to capture his design philosophy in relation to privacy. The conversation focused on four architectural privacy themes: (1) the relationship between privacy and comfort, and the roles of (2) primary, secondary, and tertiary spaces, (2) light, and (3) sounds in creating private moments in public spaces. A fifth theme encapsulates the essence of his design philosophy: “ennobling the prosaic.”