Honoring a Legacy of Drawing: UVA School of Architecture Names Inaugural Dan Rew Prize Winners

Dan Rew (M.Arch ’87) carried a sketchbook everywhere. 

In Campbell Hall, he filled its pages with competition ideas and notes taken in lectures, sketching his way through problems as they emerged. That habit never left him. Over the next 35 years, whether designing a high-performance building or sitting down to dinner, he continued to draw on “anything and everything” as former colleague Brian Kowalchuk recalls. Puzzles, the margins of books, and trace paper are just a few of the surfaces where Rew applied his quick line work.  

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Dan Rew sketching in Rome (2014), and one of his sketches in the pages of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Courtesy of the Rew family.

For Rew, drawing was never separate from design. It was how design happened. A single spread might hold a watercolor of a landscape alongside diagrams of radiant slabs and geothermal systems. As his family and friends describe it, “Dan couldn’t separate the beauty in the system from the beauty of the view.”   

Rew described his approach to architecture with clarity: 

For me, the best buildings are easily and intuitively understood... my approach synthesizes creative imagination and rational logic to integrate the functional, contextual, social, environmental and cultural aspects of a project into a unified and clear expression—architecture that builds community and a sense of place. 

That logic was shaped, in part, through drawing—the iterative act of making, revising, and refining ideas until they could be expressed simply. His sketches were “a lot like him,” said Kowalchuk, “not showy, but thoughtful, spare, and beautiful.” 

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Sketches by Dan Rew. Courtesy of the Rew family.

Over time, this way of working defined both his practice and his professional impact. As a Design Director and Vice President of Sustainability at HDR Architecture, Rew led complex, award-winning projects across the world, including research facilities, hospitals, and educational environments. He composed buildings through trace paper studies and models, using drawing to synthesize functional, environmental, and cultural conditions into a clear architectural expression.  

Colleagues remember the same qualities in his process that appear in his drawings: attentiveness, restraint, and quiet precision. His lines were a form of dialogue, a way to listen, test, and communicate. 

After Rew’s passing in 2020, his family and friends sought to carry that practice forward at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, where he spent many hours at the drafting table. The result is the Dan Rew Memorial Fund, established to support students in developing a process for seeing and designing, and to sustain a culture that values drawing as essential to their education, practice, and life. The fund supports the Dan Rew Memorial Graduation Prize, awarded annually to graduating students who demonstrate excellence in hand drawing.

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Sketches by Dan Rew. Courtesy of the Rew family.

Our wish is to recognize the School of Architecture’s graduating students who draw while they are designing, and design while they are drawing. We see the fund working over many years to support the school’s commitment to drawing as an essential tool for the architects of tomorrow. 

—Rew family and friends 

The School celebrates the inaugural recipients of the 2026 Dan Rew Memorial Graduation Prize—Nick Kaperday, Cole Rozwadowski, Nolan Brennan, and Seongmin Kim—who extend Dan Rew’s legacy in distinct ways, demonstrating that drawing remains not only relevant, but vital to how architects and designers engage the complexities of the world. 

Nick Kaperday (BS Arch '26)

What began as a long-standing personal interest has become a central tool in Nick Kaperday’s design process. 

“Sketching grew to be more than a hobby—it became a way of understanding and testing ideas. It is my favorite tool to iterate and communicate ideas, especially during desk crits.” 

Working primarily with trace paper and pen, Kaperday embraces speed, repetition, and imperfection. Rather than producing polished final drawings, he uses sketching as a generative process—one that allows ideas to evolve rapidly. 

“My strongest designs began as a brain dump,” he reflects. “Drawing became a way of thinking through problems rather than documenting a design.” 

This fall, Kaperday will pursue his graduate degree in architecture at Princeton University, where he plans to further explore drawing as a critical component of his design methodology. 

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Cole Rozwadowski (BS Arch '26)

For Cole Rozwadowski, drawing is both a personal language and a shared practice. 

“My drawing practice is my voice as a designer. I don’t really understand something unless I draw it—and chances are, no one else knows what I’m talking about until I draw it too.” 

Working with Micron pens, watercolor, and pencil, Rozwadowski values portability and immediacy, often carrying a compact sketchbook to capture observations as they arise. Beyond his individual work, he has played a significant role in cultivating a culture of drawing at UVA. As the founder of Sketch@UVA, Rozwadowski has built a community of more than 150 students who gather to draw across Grounds, Charlottesville, and beyond. 

“We created Sketch@UVA to bring people together in creative community and build the visual communication skills we’ll carry into practice.” 

Whether sketching the layered complexity of urban environments or engaging with passersby while drawing in public, Rozwadowski sees drawing as a means of connection—between ideas, people, and place. He plans to work professionally before pursuing graduate study and continue his regular sketching practice. 

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Nolan Brennan (M.Arch + MLA '26)

Drawing is a way of slowing down and paying attention for recent graduate Nolan Brennan. 

“Drawing is how I learn, how I work through problems, how I pay attention long enough to actually understand something.” 

Working in graphite, ink, and trace paper, Brennan is drawn to media that retain evidence of process—the smudges, corrections, and layered lines that record how a drawing evolves. While pursuing graduate degrees in architecture and landscape architecture at UVA, drawing became a critical bridge between the design disciplines, supporting his exploration of ecological systems, field conditions, and design research. 

“Drawing was where observation became something I could communicate—something others could engage with.” 

Transitioning into landscape architecture pushed his practice further, challenging him to represent dynamic systems such as erosion, hydrology, and plant succession. 

“I was trying to draw things that don’t hold still,” he explains. “That led me toward layered mapping and hybrid approaches that could hold that complexity.” 

For Brennan, drawing is not simply representational, it is a way of discovering, questioning, and shaping ideas. 

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Seongmin Kim (M.Arch '26)

Seongmin Kim was not available to participate in this article; sketches are included below.

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Left to right: A conceptual drawing inspired by Guan Tong’s Chinese scroll paintings explores spatial relationships between landscape and structure; studies of the Sendai Mediatheque translate its structural system into abstract diagrams of circulation and use. Part of the ARCH 6010 final project Living History Active Discourse by Seongmin Kim (instructor: Robin Dripps).