Announcement of the Girouard Fund for Publications and the 2023 SAHGB Award Winners
We are pleased to announce the launch of the Girouard Fund for Publications by the Society of Architectural Historians Great Britain in memory of one of Britain’s greatest architectural historians, Mark Mark Girouard (1931- 2022).
The Society of Architectural Historians Great Britain launched a new fund for writing and publications today in memory of Mark Girouard. Mark’s daughter, Blanche Girouard, who accepted the Society’s 2022 Colvin Prize in his name last year, gave the campaign her full support, and spoke with affection of the help and encouragement that Mark had given to many through his life as an author and campaigner as she welcomed the Society’s members and guests to the event at Toynbee Hall, East London.
The Girouard Fund will be used to promote and aid publications in architectural history which are produced in an increasingly pressurised economic environment, in which both indirect and direct costs must be borne by authors. The SAHGB intends that this fund will support researchers producing a diverse range of publications including books, journal articles, websites, bibliographies and digital formats, as well as other outputs which have the potential to take architectural history to a wider audience. The fund comes in addition to the Society’s existing support aimed at postgraduate students and education. When these new reserves are thriving, they will enable similar provision to be made right across the broad architectural history community for the first time.
You can now donate through the SAHGB website, with an option to make a Gift Aid declaration if you are a UK taxpayer, or through the charity platform JustGiving.
We have a target for the fund of £100,000 which will come from a range of sources: crowd-funded donations from members and other people; larger individual donors; and grants and trusts.
We welcome all donations however great or small and those of £1,000 or over will be acknowledged in a list of Patrons.
Donate on this website here: https://www.sahgb.org.uk/sahgb-girouard-fund
The SAHGB was delighted to welcome the winners, panel members, and supporters to celebrate the 2023 awards for research and writing. The Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion, The Colvin Prize, the Hawksmoor Essay Medal, and the Dissertation Prize results were announced as follows.
Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion
Awarded annually since 1959 to a monograph that makes an outstanding contribution to the study or knowledge of architectural history.
Judges: Dr Louise Durning, Dr John Goodall, Professor Iain Jackson, Dr Conor Lucey, Dr Diane Watters
Chair: Professor Elizabeth McKellar, SAHGB President
This year’s winner is:
Gary A. Boyd
Architecture and the Face of Coal: Mining and Modern Britain
published by Lund Humphries, 2022.
The judging panel commented:
‘Architecture and the Face of Coal provides an innovative and compelling account of a vanished and ignored built environment. Based on a wealth of primary research, it is the first book to provide a wide-ranging architectural history of an activity which was central to the social and economic life of 20th century Britain. In investigating the impact of coal mining ‘above ground’ the author reframes our understanding of modernism and town planning within an alternative geography and introduces a new discourse to industrial archaeology. Boyd argues that the impressive architecture arising from coal extraction played a key but overlooked role in the development of modern design in Britain. In looking at pithead facilities, particularly baths as well as mining settlements and new towns, the book encompasses histories of health, welfare and housing, which will be of interest to social and cultural historians as well as architectural historians.’
Colvin Prize
Awarded annually to the author or authors of an outstanding work of reference of use and value to architectural historians and the discipline of architectural history across a range of formats.
Judges: Professor Richard Brook, Professor Louise Campbell, Dr Laura Fernández-González, Dr Samantha Martin, Professor Simon Pepper
Chair: Dr Elizabeth Darling, SAHGB Chair
This year’s winners are:
Jiat-Hwee Chang, Justin Zhuang and Darren Soh
for Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore
(National University of Singapore Press)
The judging panel commented:
‘The judges of this year’s Colvin Prize faced a particularly strong shortlist and deliberated very carefully before agreeing on one commendation and deciding on the winning book.
The Colvin Prize 2023 is awarded to Everyday Modernism. The judges agreed that the collective endeavour of Jiat-Hwee Chang, Justin Zhuang and Darren Soh had created a book that was conceptually excellent, broad in scope, and ingenious in its use of different angles to explore the city of Singapore. The insightful text and specifically taken photographs combined to make a book that is eminently readable, a model for similar studies, accessible to a wide audience and an invaluable and lasting work of reference.’
Commendation:
Neal Shasore and Jessica Kelly, for Reconstruction: Architecture, Society and the Aftermath of the First World War (Bloomsbury Publishing).
The judges felt that Jessica Kelly, Neal Shasore and their contributors had produced, in Reconstruction, an important and thus commendable new study of British architecture in the period from 1918 to 1939, one that laid the ground for significant further study.
The Hawksmoor Essay Prize
To encourage new and unpublished entrants to the field of architectural history, the Society's Essay Medal (popularly known as 'the Hawksmoor') is awarded annually to the author of the best essay submitted in competition.
Judges: Professor Christian Frost, Dr Shona Kallestrup, Dr Emily Mann
Chair: Dr Maximilian Sternberg
This year’s winner is:
Emily Rose Jenkins (University of Cambridge)
‘Gorhambury: An Elizabethan Ruin and Identity in the Late Eighteenth Century’.
The judging panel commented:
‘Rigorously researched and beautifully written and presented, this engaging essay makes an original contribution to British architectural, landscape and cultural history by considering the ruination of the Tudor house of Old Gorhambury in Hertfordshire as integral to the construction of a new mansion on the estate in the eighteenth century. Drawing on a rich range of visual material including an unpublished watercolour in the Bodleian Library’s Gough Collection, alongside building accounts, letters, journals, travel literature and antiquarian publications, the author offers a detailed understanding of the late 1700s building project, revealing the kind of portrait it fashioned of the owner and more broadly shedding new light on contemporary attitudes towards historical (specifically Elizabethan) British architecture and the meanings and functions of ruins. The essay elegantly and persuasively recontextualises this moment of demolition and construction in the English countryside, widening the frame of the Grand Tour to include domestic tourism and discourse, and illuminating the relationship between eighteenth-century antiquarianism, building practice and identity formation.’
The Dissertation Prize
This prize celebrates the outstanding work in architectural history being carried out by postgraduate students on taught Masters-level courses in UK universities. The prize awards innovative and critical thinking in and around the subject of Architectural History, broadly conceived, which supports the Society’s aim to help create ‘a bigger discipline’.
To acknowledge the differences in the educational and pedagogical structures at different courses, the Society has two distinct categories for the Dissertation Prize.
Category 1 celebrates Dissertations written as part of a taught MA / MSc course in Architectural History, Heritage or Conservation.
Category 2 honours dissertations submitted at MArch and MSc courses researching questions of architectural history as a broader field.
Judges:
Category 1: Dr Katrione Byrne, Neil Gregory and Dr Matthew Wells
Category 2: Professor Janina Gosseye and Dr Yasmina El Chami
Chair: Professor Luca Csepely-Knorr
Category 1
This year’s winner is:
Eliot Haworth, The Bartlett School of Architecture, nominated by Robin Wilson.
“Things Get In”. A Study of arthropod life at the Couvent Sainte Marie de la Tourette.
The judging panel commented:
‘“Things get in” is a wonderfully innovative exploration of arthropod life within Le Corbusier’s the Couvent Sainte-Marie de la Tourette in Éveux, France. Using the framework of the interior as a physically porous space that reinforces separation between human and nonhuman, this research focuses on arthropodal presence within the building to disturb the notion of the bounded interior. It shows how, by looking at such a well-known project afresh, new knowledges about architecture and its histories can be unearthed. In developing and testing a methodology for studying the lives of arthropods in and around La Tourette it produces a wider ethical and political sensibility that suggests buildings, and by extension human lives, are enmeshed within a wider ecology and not separable from it. “Things get in” explores and unearths possible pathways for situating architecture within a context that, as the author puts it, ‘is always more than human.’
Commendation:
Srinivas Minjur Subudhinathan, University of Edinburgh, MSc, ‘Remembering the Colonial Soldier. The Indian undertaking of the Imperial War Graves Commission, 1917 - 1919’.
Category 2
This year’s winner is:
Manahil Raza, University of Oxford, nominated by Cora Gilroy Ware
‘Do they even want it back? The national museum in the postcolonial State’
The judging panel commented:
‘”Do they even want it back? The national museum in the postcolonial State” is a confident and well-written dissertation, that considers nationalist curation of museums in former colonial settings. It argues that, while museums in the West are making self-conscious efforts to ‘decolonize’, museums in formerly colonized countries — particularly Pakistan— are becoming more wedded to nationalistic and reactionary curatorial approaches.
Exemplified in the National History Museum of Lahore, postcolonial museology in Pakistan shows an attempt to frame a cohesive national identity centred around the Partition of India and the consequent birth of Pakistan as a nation state. The dissertation contributes to important current discussions around decolonizing collections worldwide and national identity in the 20th/21st century. The work is thought-provoking and well-illustrated and reflective. It invites the reader to consider critically the idea of museums and visiting museums.
Commended:
Amy Brar, the AA School of Architecture
‘Precarious Waters. Spatializing Agency among Dispossessed Fisher Women of Lake Chilika’
Hannah Daniels, Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University
‘Valorisation and sustainable reuse of West Midlands Hop Kilns’
The SAHGB’s internationally prestigious awards programme celebrates the best in research and publishing in architectural history. It is open and inclusive, celebrating diversity of approach in histories of the built environment as broadly conceived. You do not need to be a member to nominate or be nominated.
Full lists of the judging panels for this year’s prizes can be found here, alongside more information on the awards programme, including how to nominate works.
