Reorienting the Strip Mall

Johnson, Arkansas may sound a bit remote to serve as the cradle for a suburban architectural revolution, but at the American Institute of Architecture's national convention in Los Angeles last week, Marlon Blackwell's Srygley Office Building in Johnson, near Fayetteville, was honored as "a wonderful argument to banal suburban office parks." Blackwell is recognized internationally, but his best-known buildings are in the South, and he has gained a reputation as an architect-laureate of the Ozarks. (His modernist redesign of Arkansas House in the state's northwest corner was also cited in L.A.) He is fond of "plunking down industrial-strength structures in these bucolic settings," according to ID magazine, which made him one of their young architects to watch in 1995.

His strip-mall building in Johnson is a vaulting box of concrete and corrugated metal with a bent for nature. It turns its back on traffic to face a creek, with native grasses planted where cars are normally parked. In the two-story wing of the building, shown above, employees can cook, relax and take in views of the wooded scene from two decks. Most suburban buildings, don't make use of where they sit, he says. "They're boilerplate buildings plopped down on site."