C3_UAFS_FW1112:alum news 11/11/11 4:55 PM Page C3
ZACK THOMAS
WESTARK BLEND— Until the early 1990s, all the brick used on the UAFS campus came from Acme Brick’s Fort Smith plant, where clay from the pit on the other side of Old Greenwood Road was fired in round “beehive” kilns. Because heat rises, the bricks near the bottom of the kiln came out lightest and those near the top darkest, yielding a natural blend of colors. Then Acme built a stateof-the-art new tunnel-type kiln in Tulsa, capable of making smoother, more precisely shaped bricks—and doing it more efficiently than the Fort Smith plant, to boot. But the bricks, which rolled through the kiln on railcars, came out uniformly colored, without the subtle variation produced by the old beehive kilns. Acme did lots of experimentation to match the naturally occurring blend from the Fort Smith plant by combining various colors from the Tulsa plant, finally settling on an 80-20 mix of two existing colors—Garnet and Crimson—that was first used on the Math-Science building in 1991. Dubbed “Westark Blend,” it has been used for every campus building since, as well as other local buildings like the pavilion and event center on the riverfront. Close as Westark Blend is to the old Fort Smith brick, though, it’s not indistinguishable side-by-side. Not only is the color slightly different, but the Fort Smith brick is a little rougher, softer-edged, more “rustic.” So, for the new addition to Boreham Library—the last building on campus to be built with Fort Smith brick, shown here—the bricks will again come from Fort Smith’s beehive kilns.