Architecture Firm Hnedak Bobo Group Announces Winners of Second Annual Design Competition

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Two fifth-year architecture students in the Fay Jones School of Architecture have won this year’s Hnedak Bobo Group International Design Award. Douglas Brewer and Ryan Wilmes will split the $5,000 prize awarded by Hnedak Bobo Group, the Memphis, Tenn., architecture firm that also helped judge the submissions. Mark Weaver, a principal architect with the firm and a 1982 graduate of the architecture school, coordinated the competition.

“We established this award because we feel strongly that study abroad is so important, for students to get out and see the world,” Weaver said.

Students could submit any studio project completed during their required semester of study abroad, which included Rome or Mexico City, in the 2008-09 school year. Six designs were submitted for this second annual award competition. Each design was mounted on a 30-by-30-inch foam board and accompanied by a Power Point presentation.

Judges from the architecture school included Marlon Blackwell, professor and head of the architecture department; Tahar Messadi, associate professor; and Jeffrey Huber, adjunct professor and also project designer at the University of Arkansas Community Design Center. The winning design was announced Monday, Nov. 16, after a reception of pizza and drinks in Vol Walker Hall’s Shollmier Lecture Hall. The six submissions are on display on the building’s first floor.

The winning project addressed the transit system in the heart of Rome, at the site of the Piazza Venezia. The students were partly inspired by Lucio Fontana, an Italian-Argentine artist who made paintings three-dimensional by slashing them. They related that slash in a canvas to the axis of a street, and imagined the crossing streets as cross slits in the city’s fabric. With slits cut in the piazza, the fragmented surface raised up to allow light into the underground pedestrian thoroughfare leading to the subway system.

“They picked a conceptual idea here of a painting and slashes through it and equated that to the street and the axis of the streets and how they enter into an axis. And so it was such a strong idea,” Weaver said.

Blackwell said the winning project particularly looked to the locale for inspiration.

“This project taps into the ancient city’s infrastructure — into the belly of the beast, so to speak — and integrates it with a modern infrastructure, the transit infrastructure there,” Blackwell said. “We call this a really stealthy scheme that both excavates the past while politely conforming to its context.”

Wilmes, from Joplin, Mo., also won $1,000 in prize money in last year’s competition, for a design based on his studies in Mexico. Brewer is from Monticello.