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Fay Jones School student David Sweere awarded 2019 Aydelott Prize for travel research

2020-05-13T18:58:00-04:00

University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design fifth-year architecture student David Sweere has been awarded the 2019 Aydelott Prize, beating out three other competing Aydelott Travel Award recipients.

The Aydelott Travel Award and Prize have been awarded each year since 2016. The unconventional award program selects four Travel Award winners who are each given $20,000 to visit and analyze four buildings of their choosing, with one student selected from this cohort for the Prize portion of the program. Each student is asked to produce an essay documenting and analyzing their research and these essays are what is judged to determine who is ultimately awarded the Aydelott Prize.

Pet Plaza in St. Louis, designed by Alfred Lewis Aydelott. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user Teemu08.

The award was created in part to highlight the talent emanating from schools in the southeastern United States and due to this fact, only students from University of Arkansas, Auburn Univer...

New graphic novel is set in Peter Zumthor's Therme Vals in Switzerland

2019-10-31T18:27:00-04:00

Peter Zumthor's Therme Vals, the hotel and spa in Switzerland, was designed intentionally devoid of clocks so that visitor's sense of time would be suspended and immeasurable. Completed in 1996, there is a legend about a mountain in the village of Vals that is said to have a mountain that periodically swallows people.

In his debut graphic novel, Swimming in Darkness, cartoonist Lucas Harari builds on this modern mythology. The new publication centers around an architecture school dropout named Pierre, who, after a breakdown, travels to Vals to visit Zumthor's baths, which were the subject of his unfinished thesis. Upon his arrival, Pierre discovers secret rooms within the Therme Vals and attempts to uncover their hidden truths.

This psychological thriller drops the reader into Zumthor's work and uses it as a vehicle to explore this young protagonist's existential predicament. Concerning the work, Lucas Harari said:

I visited the thermal baths of Vals as a teenager and the place str...

Peter Zumthor loses bid for Vals thermal baths

2012-03-13T00:19:00-04:00

Swiss star architect Peter Zumthor has lost a battle for ownership of the spa and hotel complex in Vals, eastern Switzerland, which he designed. The commune, which owns the complex, decided on Friday night to sell it to 35-year-old property developer Remo Stoffel.