Enfilade

From The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB) . . . with shout-out to HECAA member Basile Baudez!

The shortlists for two of the most important prizes in architectural history—the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion and the Colvin Prize—were announced this week. The Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion is awarded to a monograph that makes an outstanding contribution to the study of architectural history—previous winners include Howard Colvin, Dorothy Stroud, John Summerson, Nikolaus Pevsner, Hermione Hobhouse, and Jill Lever. The Colvin Prize, established in 2017, is awarded to an outstanding work of reference of value to the discipline irrespective of format.

The two shortlists for the awards this year demonstrate a broad range of subjects and approaches to architectural history, ranging from a global atlas of queer spaces, forensic analysis of the urban and architectural fabric of Whitechapel, a fulsome biographical dictionary of early-modern architects in Britain, through to a compendious photographic recording of all the 437 Carnegie libraries that still remain in the UK, and much more.

The winners will be selected in the autumn and announced at the Society’s Annual Lecture and Awards Ceremony in December 2022.

The awards are overseen by the SAHGB to reward work that is innovative, ambitious, and rigorous in tackling histories of the built environment as broadly conceived. The SAHGB’s awards programme, which also includes the ‘Hawksmoor’ Essay Medal, Heritage Research Award, and Dissertation Prize, is open and inclusive wherever possible, celebrating diversity of approach and recognising work at all career levels.

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Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion Shortlist

• Basile Baudez, Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press)
• Manolo Guerci, London’s ‘Golden Mile’: The Great Houses of the Strand, 1550–1650 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)
• Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, Crafting Identities: Artisan Culture in London, c. 1550–1640 (Manchester University Press)
• Nathaniel Walker, Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon (Oxford University Press)

Colvin Prize Shortlist

• Adam Nathaniel Furman + Joshua Mardell, eds., Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Places and Stories (RIBA Publishing)
• Mark Girouard, A Biographical Dictionary of English Architecture, 1540–1640 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art)
• Oriel Prizeman, The Carnegie Libraries of Britain: A Photographic Chronicle (Arts and Humanities Research Council)
• Peter Guillery, ed., Survey of London, Whitechapel: Vols 54 + 55 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press)