The IHBC is delighted to celebrate and congratulate the winners of this year’s Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB) awards, including the joint SAHGB-IHBC Heritage Research Award, awarded to Dr Victoria Perry and Isabelle Adamthwaite of IHBC HESPR member Donald Insall Associates (DIA).
IHBC Director Seán O’Reilly said: ‘This was a strong year for candidates but I’m delighted to hear that work from DIA – an IHBC HESPR Company – has been recognised this way too.
‘I’d also like to thank especially Neil Burton IHBC, Director at the Architectural History Practice – another IHBC HESPR company – for his role as a judge on our behalf’.
‘Hopefully a further highlight of this success will be the opportunity for the DIA report’s authors to join us at our 2026 Annual School in Newcastle in June.’
SAHGB writes:
We are pleased to congratulate the winners of this year’s Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain awards.
Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion: Awarded annually since 1959 to a monograph that makes an outstanding contribution to the study or knowledge of architectural history.
- Winner: André Tavares, Architecture Follows Fish: An Amphibious History of the North Atlantic (The MIT Press)
- Commendation: Dana Arnold, Women and Architectural History: The Monstrous Regiment Then and Now (Routledge)
From a strong shortlist, the SAHGB Colvin Prize is awarded to Reclaiming Colonial Architecture, edited by Tania Sengupta and Stuart King and featuring essays by 45 authors.
- Winner: Tania Sengupta and Stuart King, Reclaiming Colonial Architecture (RIBA Publishing)
Hawksmoor Essay Medal
To encourage new and unpublished entrants to the field of architectural history, the Society’s Essay Medal (popularly known as ‘the Hawksmoor’) is awarded annually to the author of the best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.
- Commendation: Tom Joashi: Staging a Tragedy: On the Refurbishment of the Louvre and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572)
- Winner: Nicholas Forrest Frayne: Nyayo House as a Political Tool: The Politics of Temporal Control
The SAHGB-IHBC Heritage Research Award recognises and celebrates the quality of architectural-historical research produced by colleagues in heritage and conservation practice, as private consultants and in non-departmental public bodies.
- Commendation: Dr Michael Dring, Continuity in the Modernist City: The Heritage Activism of Save Smallbrook, Birmingham (Birmingham City University)
- Winner: Dr Victoria Perry and Isabelle Adamthwaite (Donald Insall Associates), Georgetown, Guyana (Excerpt from Georgetown Conservation Area Management Plan 2025)
The Dissertation Prizes
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: For dissertations by students on taught Masters-level courses related to architectural history and heritage
- Category 1 Winner: Zaina Abou Seif, Between Earth and Ink: Vernacular, Memory, and Utopia in Hassan Fathy’s Architectural Visualisations
Category 2: For dissertations by taught Masters-level students on accredited professional architecture (MArch) degrees
- Category 2 Commendation: Io Grivea, Ethnography of the Middle: Tracing the Visible and Invisible Bureaucratic Curators of Athens’ Modern Heritage
- Category 2 Winner: Alexandra-Clara Popescu, Memory as an Act of Spatial (Re)production
Read more about the prizewinning work
See more on the SAHGB-IHBC Heritage Research Award
