Society of Architectural Historians Announces 2023 Award Recipients

The Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2023 SAH Publication Awards and SAH Award for Film and Video. The awards recognize distinguished publications in architectural history, urban history, landscape history, preservation, and architectural exhibition catalogues; an outstanding JSAH article written by an emerging scholar; and the most distinguished work of film or video on the history of the built environment. The Society announced the winners at its 76^th Annual International Conference in Montréal.

The award winners are listed below.

Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award

The Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award was established in 1949 to recognize annually the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of architecture published by a North American scholar.

Andrew Demshuk
Three Cities After Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

Antoinette Forrester Downing Book Award

Named for Antoinette Forrester Downing, this award recognizes excellence in a published work devoted to historical topics in preservation and honors her scholarship and recognition of the value of local inventories and surveys.

John Vinci, Editor – With Tim Samuelson, Eric Nordstrom and Chris Ware
Reconstructing the Garrick: Adler & Sullivan’s Lost Masterpiece
Alphawood Foundation, Distributed by University of Minnesota Press, 2021

SAH Exhibition Catalogue Award

Architectural history exhibitions address historical and critical questions in special ways, through the presentation of both documentation and artifacts to a diversified audience. Exhibition catalogues have become distinctive vehicles for the expression of scholarship in architectural history. They remain as the substantial and enduring contribution after the life of the exhibition is spent. The SAH Exhibition Catalogue Award recognizes excellence in this form of scholarship and publication.

Jean-Louis Cohen
Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture
Yale University Press and Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2020

Honorable Mention
Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson, Editors
Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America
The Museum of Modern Art, 2021

Spiro Kostof Book Award

This award was established in 1993 in recognition of Spiro Kostof's extraordinarily productive and inspiring career. In the spirit of Kostof's writings, the award recognizes interdisciplinary studies of urban history that make the greatest contribution to our understanding of the growth and development of cities.

Michael J. Schreffler
Cuzco: Incas, Spaniards, and the Making of a Colonial City
Yale University Press, 2020

Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award

The Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award was established in 2005 to recognize annually the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of landscape architecture or garden design. Named for SAH past president and landscape historian Elisabeth MacDougall, the award honors the late historian's role in developing this field of study.

Anatole Tchikine and Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey
Francesco Ignazio Lazzari’s Discrizione della villa pliniana: Visions of Antiquity in the Landscape of Umbria
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2021

Founders' JSAH Article Award

Established in 1970, the Founders’ Award recognizes an article published by an emerging scholar in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) that exhibits excellence of scholarship and presentation.

M. Wesam Al Asali, Dania González Couret, and Michael H. Ramage
“Beyond the National Art Schools: Thin-Tile Vaulting in Cuba after the Revolution”
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 80 No. 3, September 2021

SAH Award for Film and Video

The SAH Award for Film and Video recognizes the most distinguished work of film or video on the history of the built environment. The most important criterion for award recognition is the work’s contribution to the understanding of the built environment, defined either as deepening that understanding or as bringing that understanding to new audiences.

We Love We Self Up Here
Year Completed: 2021
Kannan Arunasalam, Director
Tao DuFour and Natalie Melas, Producers

We Love We Self Up Here is a documentary short that explores narratives of lived experiences of urban, agricultural, and industrial landscapes tied to colonial and postcolonial legacies of sugar production and hydrocarbon extraction in Trinidad & Tobago. The film captures complex histories of labor and migration through the intimate stories of a few persons. The spaces of narration—domestic, neighborhood, and landscape—themselves emerge as “characters,” architectural and landscape witnesses to long processes of social and environmental change. The history of architecture in the Caribbean is inseparable from that of the parallel development of capitalism, slavery, and indentured servitude. These emerged through the appropriation and design of the landscape itself, as a function of colonial capitalist modernity’s extractive regime with its highly profitable re-invention of the racial division of labor in the plantation system, and the indigenous genocide and coerced migration of peoples it entailed. It is in the face of this haunting background that the first generation of post- or de-colonial thinkers took it as one of their tasks to make this landscape possible—in literature, philosophy and the arts—as a space of embodied lived experience. We Love We Self Up Here offers narrative insight into this sedimented history in the way that it, to quote Édouard Glissant, “still reverberates to this day” in the lived spatial experiences of the landscapes of the people of the Caribbean. The film has been screened at Cornell AAP, Harvard GSD, and the Department of Architecture at Cambridge University, UK.

Nominations for the 2023 award cycle will open in June. 

Media Contact: Helena Dean, hdean@sah.org  
High-resolution images available upon request