Fay Jones School Students Earn Prestigious Aydelott Prize Three Years in a Row

For three consecutive years, the Aydelott Prize has come home to Fayetteville. Faith Hilvert, Canaan Thomas and Casey Hanauer each earned the prestigious prize for their architectural research, making students from the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the U of A the Aydelott Prize recipients in 2025, 2024 and 2023, respectively.

Their winning projects span continents, disciplines and ways of understanding architecture. While their approaches differed, their experiences shared a common thread: each student used the opportunity to move beyond studying architecture from a distance to experiencing it firsthand. The three-year run also reflects the kind of independent thinking the Aydelott program encourages.

"Three consecutive Aydelott Prize recipients is an extraordinary distinction for the Department of Architecture," said John Folan, professor and department head. "What matters most is what their work represents. Faith, Canaan and Casey each began with questions that were authentic and guided by their own interests. Each pursued them with rigor through direct experiences of their own definition. That intellectual agency is something we work very hard to cultivate at the Fay Jones School. We are grateful to the Aydelott Foundation for providing our students with opportunities, through both the Travel Award and Prize programs, to pursue aspirational questions of consequence with an extraordinary degree of freedom and ambition."

Established by the late Alfred Lewis and Hope Galloway Aydelott, the Aydelott Travel Award gives architecture students the opportunity to pursue an individual research question through travel and firsthand study. Each year, the travel award is presented to one undergraduate architecture student at four Southern universities: Mississippi State University, the U of A, Auburn University and the University of Tennessee. Each student receives an award of $20,000 to fund their travel to analyze four buildings of their choosing. Following their travels, the four recipients submit an essay about their particular research, and one student is selected to receive the Aydelott Prize.

For the Fay Jones School's three most recent winners, the opportunity produced three very different investigations.

Faith Hilvert — 2025

When Hilvert, from Mountain Home, applied for the Aydelott Travel Award, she wasn't sure what would happen.

"Complete shock," Hilvert said, recalling when she learned she had received the award. "I applied pretty last minute, and I think part of me treated the application as one of those 'why not' things."

That spontaneous decision ultimately sent Hilvert around the world. Her project examined four architects through homes they designed for themselves: Geoffrey Bawa in Sri Lanka, Kunio Maekawa in Japan, Robin Boyd in Australia and Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona.

"I was really interested in looking at the homes of architects as these kind of rare pieces of architecture designed without many external constraints, and therefore potentially most revealing of an architect's mind," she said.

Hilvert intentionally chose projects that were less directly shaped by European modernism, hoping to better understand the individual architects behind them. She worked with faculty mentor Alyssa Kuhns, former assistant professor of architecture, on this research.

That decision meant traveling farther and taking a less convenient route, but it also allowed Hilvert to study architecture within the cultures and climates that shaped it. The experience changed the way she approached her own design work.

"It absolutely taught me to slow down my design process," she said. "What I learned from these architects was how much can come from simply paying attention to what is already there, in the culture, the daily ritual, the atmosphere, material, history, landscape and so on."

One of her most memorable experiences came at Lunuganga, Geoffrey Bawa's estate in Sri Lanka, where Hilvert lived for a week. Staying in a different room each night made her feel as though she was moving through different chapters of Bawa's life.

Experiences like that shifted her research from simply studying buildings to understanding the people and convictions behind them.

"Definitely," Hilvert said, when asked whether her perspective changed during the trip. "It became so much more about the authors and their personal convictions that made their way into tangible design."

Canaan Thomas — 2024

A year earlier, Thomas used the Aydelott Travel Award to investigate something less immediately visible than a building's form. Thomas focused on the sensory qualities of architecture and how spaces can affect people through light, texture, temperature, sound and movement. She worked with faculty mentors Kim Sexton, associate professor of architecture, and Alyssa Kuhns on this research.

"I wanted to understand how spaces can calm us, ground us and bring us into a state of peace through what we see, hear, touch and feel in our bodies," said Thomas, who's from Denison, Texas.

For Thomas, that question could not be answered entirely through drawings or photographs.

"I would not have been able to understand my project or even research my topic without being there in person," she said. "My work was about how the human senses are activated through space, and there was no way to grasp that from a distance."

Traveling pushed her to become more intentional about the qualities that inform design.

"Being in unfamiliar places made me pay closer attention to light, scale, material and atmosphere, and I think it shaped me into a far more site-sensitive designer," Thomas said. "It taught me to read a place before trying to design for it."

One of her most lasting experiences came after hours of traveling across Japan by bus, taxi and on foot to reach a funeral home.

Thomas had studied the building beforehand, but experiencing it in person changed her understanding of its architecture. The building's massive columns tapered into delicate points, creating a quiet clarity that Thomas connected to the physical experience of grief.

"It reminded me of the way grief feels in the body, starting heavy and overwhelming and slowly narrowing into something you learn to hold," she said.

The experience reinforced her belief in architecture's emotional capacity and the importance of experiencing spaces with the entire body.

Casey Hanauer — 2023

For Hanauer, from Collierville, Tennessee, the Aydelott Travel Award provided an opportunity to bring two passions together. An oboist for 13 years, Hanauer studied four concert halls in different countries through both an architectural and musical lens. She ultimately played in six halls, using her instrument to experience the buildings as more than visual objects.

"I got to study the halls as if they were an instrument in and of themselves," said Hanauer, who worked with faculty mentor Tahar Messadi, associate professor of architecture.

The approach allowed her to investigate acoustics through direct experience, examining qualities such as liveliness, brilliance, clarity, warmth, intimacy and spaciousness while considering how geometry, materials and volume affected sound.

By playing her oboe in the halls, Hanauer could experience how the spaces responded to her music.

"I could feel myself changing the way I played the oboe to adapt to the volume, absorption and reflectiveness of the halls," she said.

That experience also brought her back to questions she had begun asking early in architecture school. As she progressed through her studies and became more immersed in the technical elements of architecture, she felt she had begun to move away from the fundamental experience of being inside a space. Traveling brought those questions back into focus.

"I started to go back to these design questions of 'What do I feel in the spaces I design?' 'What do I hear?' 'What do I experience?'" she said.

Her experience at the National Forum of Music in Poland was particularly powerful. After studying the building's history and architectural qualities, Hanauer walked onto the stage and played her oboe inside the hall.

"The combination of the history, the visual grandeur and beauty, and the haunting sound brought me to tears while I was playing," she said.

Her research also challenged her expectation that she would find the one "perfect" concert hall.

Instead, she discovered that different spaces excel in different ways, influenced not only by their architecture but also by their history, location and the kinds of music performed there.

Three Approaches, One Continuing Legacy

Hilvert, Thomas and Hanauer approached the Aydelott Travel Award with three distinctly personal questions.

Hilvert was curious about what architects reveal about themselves through the spaces they create for themselves. Thomas wanted to assess how architecture can be felt through the senses and experienced by the body. Hanauer sought to understand how architecture and acoustics interact, using her own experience as a musician to investigate concert halls from the inside.

Each traveled thousands of miles. Each encountered buildings that challenged what they thought they knew. And each returned to the Fay Jones School with a different understanding of how they wanted to approach architecture.

Together, their work also represents something larger: three consecutive Aydelott Prize winners from the same architecture program. Their accolades add to David Sweere, a 2020 architecture and Honors College graduate from Maumelle, who received the 2019 Aydelott Prize.

This streak is not simply a collection of individual accomplishments. It reflects a culture that encourages students to ask their own questions, pursue ideas with curiosity and rigor, and engage architecture beyond the boundaries of the traditional classroom.

For the Aydelott winners, the award opened doors to places they might otherwise never have experienced. More importantly, it gave them the freedom to investigate architecture on their own terms. And across the last three years, those investigations have continued to bring the Aydelott Prize back to the Fay Jones School.