An Architect’s View of Privacy

Abstract

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.”

Introduction

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. 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.¹ 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.” This chapter is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Theme 1: Privacy and Comfort in Design

Lynda: Marlon, thank you for meeting with us today. We’d like to first ask you to put architecture privacy in a bigger global and historical context of privacy design, then share your own experiences from your global travels. Have you noticed shifts in privacy design between Eastern and Western cultures?

Marlon: While I am not a historian, I did teach a course called “house culture,” which was on the origins and evolution of the American private house. We went through the whole history of privacy in architecture. The medieval times stick out in my mind as an example of a culture with a very different sense of privacy and personal space. People were more communal and familial. The idea of comfort was very different in terms of furniture design and room size. Their beds were often as big as the room. Guests traveled far, so when guests came over to visit, by the end of the evening everybody just slept in the same giant bed. So that is a different form of privacy and comfort. Privacy and comfort tie together to indicate whether someone is comfortable or uncomfortable in a space.

For many Americans in the United States to feel comfortable, they seem to require much larger personal spaces than for example, someone from Japan, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Americans’ concept of privacy and comfort may come from our pioneering spirit; we have all this space and horizons that extend endlessly. In addition to this notion of the prevalence of horizon, the sense that everyone should have their own space comes along with American individualism. That doesn’t mean that Americans don’t share, but in terms of one’s own space as an abode, an American ideal is to have the detached single-family dwelling, surrounded by land—preferably agrarian—with secondary structures for the livestock. Americans don’t typically put animals in the house.

I’ve been to the city of Shibam in Yemen. They have hundreds of ancient towers, six to eight stories tall, made from mud brick, gypsum, and other natural materials (see Fig. 9.1). The ground level is given over to the animals, the next level to the women, above them is the kitchen, then the men. Above the men is the mafraj, which is the living area where people take food, socialize, and enjoy the views. Gypsum screens on the windows protect the privacy of the women inside. The bathrooms are near the top and human waste is funneled down a chute at the side of the building and lands at the bottom to become a compost pile used to fertilize their fields. It’s the true definition of indigenous—nothing is left to chance; nothing is wasted, everything is recycled. Even the city of Shibam is organized around gender, which is a different form of privacy compared to the West.

Fig. 9.1

Panorama of Shibam, Hadhramaut Province, Yemen

(Image credit licensed from iStock.com/javarman3)

I’ve also traveled to Mexico, Mali in West Africa, and to places in South America like Peru where the animals people eat live inside with the residents, such as the local guinea pig (cuy). So, there is a lot of variation in privacy and comfort as it relates to different cultures.

I think comfort is a big driver of ideas about privacy, so that’s why I put privacy and comfort together. Architecture accommodates and facilitates privacy and comfort. Comfort informs how we think about space, how it’s used, and how it’s articulated in the activities within the space.

Theme 2: Private moments in public spaces: primary, secondary, and tertiary spaces

Mary: Marlon, you’ve designed so many types of spaces. You’ve designed a church, several schools, a museum shop, a golf clubhouse, a bike barn, a library, a pediatric center, and much more. You described in our Honors class that one of your design principles is “creating private moments in public spaces.” Would you talk about that principle and how it was realized in some of your works?

Marlon: Yes, the idea of the private within the public and the notion of making spaces that can be used for fellowship and for solitude is often a goal in our projects. We think in terms of primary, secondary, and tertiary spaces and how they are used.

I’ll use the example of church design. One of the most tragic things to happen is for someone to lose a child. In that space of mourning at a funeral service, it’s rare that people grieve alone (physically isolated); they grieve in their own kind of mental world, but they also want to be near people. So, as an architect, we can accommodate a space in a church where someone can be part of the group but also be in solitude. Crypts, choir lofts, and side chapels are examples of creating private moments in public spaces.

Another example is the design of medieval monasteries. At the end of the monastery, the walls are thickened and carved out to the shape of a body. A forlorn window opens to the outer world. A monk could sit on the wall and not look frontally but sit in a moment of privacy. I’ve also seen examples where there is space for two people to sit and have an intimate and introspective conversation, with the world just beyond them.

For schools, we also think in terms of primary, secondary, and tertiary spaces, but we also think of school buildings as didactic. You can learn from them by the way materials come together, light comes together, and how space comes together. I think space is more stable at the center, but can be wilder at the edges. Keeping spaces open at the center means it has purpose, but the purpose isn’t so finite that there’s no wiggle room for other kinds of uses. It’s at the perimeter you can discover things, whether it’s the way in which a window is carved out of a wall, a nook that is punched through a wall, or even a stairwell can be a spatial proposition. Rather than just something that you look through or look at, you can occupy the space physically. Those become moments that are very intimate (see Fig. 9.2).

Fig. 9.2

Marygrove Early Education Center, designed by MBA

(Image Credit With permission from Marlon Blackwell Architects)

In our designs, we develop degrees of intimacy, whether it’s with oneself or with a few people. We look for clefts and canopies, a kind of back-and-forth play between the primordial notion of the cave and the forest. Fay Jones² would talk about that idea in this work. His work was really a dialogue between cave and forest that determined the choice of materials and how that material was used. Stone is more cave-like and can be used as an extension of the landscape. Tall wood structures are more like the forest that provide the canopy. When we think about the cave, again, we think about the primary, secondary, and tertiary spaces. So, in the schools we design, you’ll find places where children can just crawl up into them (see Fig. 9.3).

Fig. 9.3

Lamplighter School Innovation Lab, designed by MBA

(Image Credit With permission from Marlon Blackwell Architects)

Porches work well too as a liminal zone between the interior and exterior, between the public and the private. In schools, a porch can be a place of learning, a play area, or a refuge. On a porch, you are in an interface between the private world of the school and the public world of the street.

Furniture is also an important factor in creating private moments in public spaces. In a public garden or park, a single park bench invites solitude. Clusters with multiple seating suggest a more social interaction.

We come at design section by section in the design of schools. There’s a notion about democratic space where everybody gets the same thing, every classroom is the same, but that idea is a simplistic idea of equality about socialism. In America, the culture is more about individuality, choice, and dissimilarity. That’s why we fold the roof section so that every classroom has a different character. As students move through the curriculum, they experience different spaces. That’s very stimulating to students. It also speaks to how, for example, the Thaden School works. It has a logic, but it’s not overly systemic. We vary the volume of the space to create feelings of intimacy and feelings of community. For example, we designed a room where the ceiling is higher on one end of the classroom. Larger groups naturally congregate where the ceiling is higher, and that group will be more social. The part of the classroom with the lower ceiling naturally creates feelings of intimacy and promotes small project work. So, varying the volume of space promotes how people will use it in an equitable way. If the teacher is attentive, she understands that as well.

Lynda: In school design, how do you get around the hierarchy of the teacher at the front of the classroom speaking and the students are passive listeners?

Marlon: Yes, that’s the convention. There’s often a whiteboard or a screen for projection in a traditional classroom design. There’s nothing wrong with the convention, but there are other ways to learn. The schools we design have those things, but we design a range of classrooms with different functions. For example, in a small lab room, there is a Harkness table; it’s an elliptical table with no head of the table, where up to ten people can sit around it. It invites a seminar format and it’s a way to break down the hierarchy. In the breezeways we designed, I’ve found students out there with chalk doing math on the concrete paving. In addition to design, those uses are really driven by the teacher and the philosophy of the school.

Theme 3: Private Moments in Public Spaces: Light

Marlon: Light relates to privacy and intimacy in many ways. Most building codes require uniform lighting, the same amount of light wherever you are in an office or retail store. James Turrell, a very famous artist who deals with light, came to the University of Arkansas a few years ago. One of the first things he said in his lecture was that in Western cultures, there is too much light. We are overexposed through the insistence of uniform lighting of spaces.

That’s a big driver of mine: how can we create a greater sense of spirituality, sacredness, and serenity in space? Spaces with shadows, funnels of light, and light that changes throughout the day all have a mystery about them. They have a way of affecting our emotions, helping us to go inward, helping us to detach from the world a little bit, encouraging a sense of privacy or a sense of introspection. Why is it that those experiences only seem acceptable in the realm of the sacred? Why couldn’t you have those experiences in a doctor’s office? Why couldn’t you have them in a school? We’ve been stubbornly trying to find those moments in the schools and the medical centers we design. There are some places you can’t get around having brighter illumination but maybe you could have a dialogue between dark and light. I think that has great potential in making distinction between the public and the private.

Lynda: Would you provide an example from your work?

Marlon: In the Harvey Medical Clinic we designed, the HIPAA³ law does not allow windows in treatment rooms for children—the government is very strict about that. It doesn’t want people seeing in or seeing out. So, we skylit the spaces from above and sealed up the walls. So, you’re filling the patient rooms with natural light, but you’re not having views. The design reinforces privacy, but it doesn’t cut you off from the world. I think that is critical.

In that clinic, we created something strange because most architecture is about punching as many windows as you can in a wall; it’s strange to see a wall with no windows. By not knowing that it’s skylit until you are inside the building, it creates an active discovery from outside to inside. So, it is a masking of the façade. The exterior veils the hidden surprise on the interior.

Theme 4: Private Moments in Public Spaces: Sound

Mary: How do you think about audio privacy in design? In particular, the freedom from not hearing noise?

Marlon: Acoustics are key. It’s important to get the balance right. You may want some discrete sounds, but not make the space so quiet that it feels muffled. We want to optimize that.

We are looking at how to make an architecture that’s more thick, slow, and implicit rather than architecture that is thin, fast, and explicit. Most of the architecture today is made of planes and lines; it’s always about some kind of seamless relationship between outside and inside. When you cut through a wall, it’s like cutting through a piece of glass because there’s nothing there, so the walls are diminished in some ways, which leads to lots of acoustic issues. We’ve been very interested in thickening walls and carving into the walls or faceting of the wall to have a more distinct relationship between what’s interior, what’s exterior, and that affects acoustics as well.

Theme 5: Ennobling the Prosaic

Lynda: Of all the buildings you shared with our honors students, the students were most impressed with the Saint Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church in Springdale Arkansas (see Fig. 9.4). Why do you think they were so mesmerized?

Fig. 9.4

Saint Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church, designed by MBA

(Image Credit With permission from Marlon Blackwell Architects)

Marlon: Because it captures the imagination. It’s got a great story. It’s an example of ennobling the prosaic. It was a welding shed that we transformed into a sacred space and fellowship hall where one can worship and come together. It bridges ritualized worship with something manifested from a type of ruin. That building’s abstraction is appealing. When I presented the design to the church, people were taken aback. They were expecting a traditional Byzantine church, but with only $100 per square foot in the budget, we had to get creative. Father John understood the design. He said to the church leaders, “It’s got everything we asked for—the symbols, the colors, a dome, and places for the iconostasis.” After we explained that the proportioning system was all Greek, using the golden means and rectangles, they started to go, “Oh, I get that.” And I might add, that proportion and scale don’t cost anything—it’s free.

So, we ennobled this humble welding shed. I think it’s the modesty of it all; the lack of being ostentatious. It’s almost like a country church, but a new version of a country church. It’s not a church hidden away in the woods; it’s sitting out like a billboard along the Interstate. The notion of it being contemporaneous with our own suburban sensibilities, a kind of improvised but also dignified church. I think the church resonates with people because it is transcendent regardless of whether you are religious or not.

Mary: What are some other examples of ennobling the prosaic?

Marlon: People love the Gentry Public Library in Gentry Arkansas. We made a public library out of a 100-year-old hardware store. We also designed a bike barn in Northwest Arkansas that is a new form, but it is reminiscent of a traditional Ozark gambrel barn. They all have great stories, and a great story touches people.

Lynda: Marlon, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on privacy from an architect’s viewpoint. This will be a great contribution to the book.