Marlon Blackwell is not afraid to create a little tension. On the second floor of his new renovation and expansion of the architecture school at the University of Arkansas, which opened this fall, students file through a tall, narrow doorway as they make their way between a grand Beaux Arts–style salon into a contemporary addition. The threshold, lined with razor-thin steel panels, slices through the older interior's wall and decorative molding as if surgically inserted into the room, a move as deft as it is abrupt. Overhead, a light well, painted bright red, terminates in a rectangular oculus, introducing color and a fine-edged geometry into the white, austerely classical space. “The new and the old start to infect each other,” says Blackwell. “But rather than resolving the two, we wanted the building to resonate, to vibrate like a tuning fork.”
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