2024 Richard Guy Wilson Prize for Excellence in the Study of Buildings, Landscapes and Places
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The University of Virginia School of Architecture is pleased to announce that Pierce Lockett, a second-year doctoral student in the Department of French, has been awarded the 2024 Richard Guy Wilson Prize. Named in honor of esteemed Professor Emeritus Richard Guy Wilson, the RGW Prize recognizes the UVA student who produces the best scholarly or creative work engaging a historic building, place, or landscape. Each year, a faculty committee selected by the Chair of the Department of Architectural History awards the prize, which carries a $5,000 cash award.
2024 Richard Guy Wilson Prize Winning Submission
“Building Babel at the Bibliothèque Nationale: Finding Aurélien Bellanger’s Le vingtième siècle (The Twentieth Century), 2023” by Pierce Lockett
In this compelling and beautifully crafted essay, Lockett offers a nuanced analysis of Aurélien Bellanger’s Le vingtième siècle, a contemporary novel about a (fictive) novel on the German philosopher and writer Walter Benjamin, which is hidden in the French National Library (Bibliothèque nationale de France) in Paris. Mirroring the novel’s kaleidoscopic mise en abyme structure—a story within a story—Lockett masterfully interweaves literary analysis with insightful reflections on the architectural, urban, and experiential dimensions of place. The National Library, with its distinctive glass towers mimicking books and its notoriously labyrinthine organization, emerges in Lockett’s treatment as a shape-shifting cultural object: a foreboding monument to historical erasures embedded in a seemingly transparent glass structure, and a literary agent in its own right.
The jury commended Lockett’s essay as an intellectually ambitious and carefully composed exploration of Walter Benjamin and his writings, architecture and the library as an institution, the novel as a genre, and the cultural politics of contemporary France. His work exemplifies the spirit of the Richard Guy Wilson Prize, demonstrating a seamless integration of literary analysis with a sustained examination of place. As one juror noted, there is "intelligence in every sentence."
Lockett originally authored this essay for French Literature Now, a graduate seminar taught by Professor Ari Blatt in Spring 2023. His forthcoming dissertation will further investigate contemporary French literature and cinema’s engagement with urban planning, architecture, and the built environment, particularly the affects these structures elicit both in and off the page.
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About the 2024 Richard Guy Wilson Prize Winner
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Pierce Lockett’s research focuses on contemporary French and Francophone fiction and cinema, urban studies, and affect theory. His secondary interests include postcolonial studies and digital humanities. His scholarship explores how contemporary literary and cinematic texts highlight the spatial, aesthetic, and political dilemmas tied to negative affective states—boredom, disgust, ennui—and their impact on cities and cultural texts alike. For the 2024-2025 academic year, Lockett is a lecteur at l’Université de Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC), further advancing his engagement with French literature and urban studies.
2024 Richard Guy Wilson Prize Jury
Jane Alison, Professor of Creative Writing, College of Arts & Sciences
Mike Gallmeyer, Consumer Bankers Association Eminent Professor of Commerce, McIntire School of Commerce
Michael Lee, Reuben M. Rainey Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, School of Architecture
Learn more about the RGW Prize, which is now open for submissions (due May 23, 2025) by clicking on the button below.
