Francis Terry full ‘Laudatio’ at the TAG Awards 2025, evoking the long and fruitful career of his father, Quinlan Terry

“My father has always had a remarkable gift: the ability to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time…yet, on occasion, also in the spectacularly wrong place at the wrong time.

Whether it was altering Jack Profumo’s house in the midst of an infamous sex scandal, measuring Roman ruins in Libya during the Gaddafi coup, or designing a Bahai temple in Tehran on the eve of the Iranian Revolution, he somehow managed to find himself where history was being written.

But perhaps the most important moment of being in the right place at the right time came much earlier, when he was in his mid-twenties and started working for Raymond Erith, one of a dying breed of traditional architects. My father became the only architect of his generation to inherit an existing architectural practice rather than establish his own new studio. In so doing, he became a rare modern link back to the architectural traditions of the pre-modern world. Like a hand stretching back through history and reconnecting the contemporary world with its forgotten ancient past.

I remember at the tender age of eleven being with my parents in Venice for the infamous first Venice Biennale in 1980 when Postmodern architecture was launched on the world. Even at that young age I saw what was plainly obvious to a child, that these postmodern architects with their eggcup finials and fiberglass keystones were not serious. This was a game, it was ironic…a fashion. But I could see that my father‘s work was, by contrast, unmistakably serious and authentic. He wasn’t trying to impress the critics or chase intellectual fads. In fact, quite the opposite. He was building for the ordinary person... for the architecturally untrained. For the people so often ignored, even dismissed by the architectural establishment as ‘hopelessly nostalgic’ or ‘dangerously backward-looking’.

Because of this, he became something of an outsider, rarely winning awards (he will not be getting an RIBA Gold medal any time soon), and he quietly honed his skills in near obscurity.

And yet, he has had the last laugh.

In 1984 when the then Prince of Wales gave his infamous carbuncle speech and became an accidental promotor of traditional architecture, my father was there, pencils in hand ready to go. He became, if the newspapers are to be believed  ‘the prince's favourite architect’.

Classical architecture that was declared dead in the 1970s is now a vital, growing, and celebrated part of contemporary design... just look around!

And I think we can all agree that we have my father, Quinlan Terry, to thank for keeping the flame alive.”

Francis Terry 04.12.2025