Best Measured Drawing 2023

This year’s winner of the £500 for First Place was awarded to Luka Pajovic for his beautiful rendering of Wren’s Christ Church, Greyfriars, London, a part measured drawing of the extant ruins combined with a virtual reconstruction of the original Wren design. An apposite entry, coming 300 years after the death of Sir Christopher Wren.

In Second Place was this pencil rendering of a Belfast Townhouse by Alex Peacock:

Joint Third Place went to Alexander Hulton for his water-coloured drawing of a Sir Edwin Lutyens building on Piccadilly, and Jeremy Gaunt for his sensitive CAD drawn section through St. Mary Magdalen Church in Paddington:

The standard was so high this year that from 26 entries, we selected 3 Runners Up for their excellent imagery: Ciaran Dolan for his drawing of the Lion Gate, Mote Park in Ireland; Patrick Collins for his CAD drawing of 87 Chancery Lane, London; and from Utah in the USA: Zachery Campbell for his Analytique of a Meditation Chapel.

Best Student Project 2023

This year, we felt that 3 entries were ahead of the rest, but compared to some exemplary work in previous years, didn’t quite reach a level that the judges could award a first place to. So, rather unusually, we have awarded each of the 3 students a worthy Second Place. In no particular order are:

Andreea Camelia Ciuc from Kingston School of Art for her design for a hotel at Holborn Circus.

Emily Walker, also from Kingston School of Art for the same brief.

Last but not least is Harry Cooper from the University of Bath for his design for a National Museum of Bullfighting, Zaragoza, Spain.

Best Member’s Built Project 2023

We had a very diverse range of scales of project this year, so it was not an easy job to compare and separate one out from the rest, but the judges felt that Stuart Martin, who won in 2021, had designed another rigorous and holistic design that embodied the spirit of new traditional architecture. His cottage in Somerset was therefore awarded the TAG Prize.

In joint Second Place were Giles Reid for his house in Islington, and Simon Lilley, the project architect from Stanhope Gate Architecture for their Val d’Europe project near Paris.

We enjoyed looking at all the other entries: A garden pavilion by Russell Taylor; a Glasgow terrace by John Burns; and an artist’s studio in Camden by Timothy Smith and Jonathan Taylor.

Special Award for a TAG Member 2023

This year, longstanding, and dedicated TAG member, Howard Vie created and taught a drawing course to a group of primary school children in Dudley. Having been contacted by King Alfred School, TAG was asked if it could find someone to help cultivate in their students an appreciation for our country’s architectural heritage. Both the pupils and Howard alike enjoyed the whole experience, and TAG is delighted that a new younger generation is being encouraged to engage with our rich traditional built environment, and we wish this might happen more widely in the future.

Lifetime Achievement Award 2023

Craig Hamilton

The part of the evening dedicated to Awards culminated with the presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Award to Craig Hamilton, with which TAG recognises a body of work of rare sensitivity and distinction. His buildings emanate a timeless quality - timeless also in being convincingly contemporary, something that has drawn attention from beyond classical circles. Indeed, this led Ellis Woodman, a thoughtful critic of modern design who normally focusses on 20th and 21st century material, to publish a monograph on Craig’s work appositely titled Temples and Tombs on account of a recurrent preoccupation with the sacred. 

The other notable characteristic of Craig Hamilton’s mission is the insistence that architecture is an art, as he reaffirmed in his gracious acceptance speech in the hall of the Art Workers Guild, the walls of which, as he also noted, carries portraits of forebears he much admires. The artistic dimension of his practice’s buildings and his whole approach is supported by lifelong habits and preoccupations: measuring and recording buildings incessantly (in notebooks set aside for consultation whenever needed); in the kind of architects he admires the most, and who look over his shoulder as it were as he designs himself (Michelangelo and Lutyens); in his own compositions and paintings; in his recurrent collaborations with the sculptor Alexander (Sandy) Stoddart, and in the fact of his marriage to his painter wife, Diana Hulton. 

In Craig Hamilton’s buildings the contemplative and the artistic are wedded together so inextricably that one is invited into a poignant reverie, a feeling of light from the past illuminating a serene path forward undeflected by contingent distractions and pressures thanks to the deserved protection of the muses.