New wing of Honors College, at University of Arkansas. (RAMSA)

Gary Brewer of RAMSA designed a beautiful new wing for an old academic building, the Honors College (imagine that!) at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville a while back and I am remiss to have allowed readers to wait so long before exhibiting it.

http://www.ramsa.com/en/projects-search/academic/restoration-and-expansion-of-ozark-hall.html

Gary designed the excellent Jonathan Nelson Fitness Center at Brown a couple of years ago. While he was working on that he urged me to write of two additions to historic college buildings going up in Fayetteville at the same time, his and the one below, which, predictably enough, speaks volumes about the architecture school to which it is so awkwardly attached. That the students did not threaten to burn the new wing down (I am taking it on faith that they did not) says even more about them than the wing itself. The wing was designed by Marlon Blackwell, and while they are sufficiently pathetic in their own right, the real villains are the stewards of the school of architecture and their lords and masters among the university’s board of trustees. To look at it one can only wonder what drug the stewards of the Honors College must have slipped into the trustees’ tea to get them to agree to something as beautiful as the wing Gary designed. Maybe it had something to do with the first word in the name of the facility.