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Hatherley wins Architectural Book of the Year for Artificial Islands
The 2023 Architectural Book of the Year has gone to Artificial Islands by Owen Hatherley, published by Repeater Books.
Artificial Islands was selected as the Architectural Monograph of the Year, one of three shortlist categories, before being named overall winner of the Architectural Book Awards at a ceremony hosted by the Zaha Hadid Foundation on 12th July.
The other two shortlisted winners were Queer Spaces, edited by Adam Nathaniel Furman and Joshua Mardell (RIBA Publishing), selected by the judges as their Architectural Reference Book of the Year, and Master of the House, by the theatre critic Michael Coveney (Unicorn), awarded Architectural History Book of the Year.
Artificial Islands was applauded by the judges for its articulate exploration of Britain’s legacy of imperial buildings overseas, and what these buildings reveal about the emergence of distinct and separate national identities in the former Dominions.
They said it “offers a counter-polemic to the idea, promoted by Dominic Cummings and others, that the UK’s departure from the EU calls for the creation of an economic union with those parts of the Commonwealth still governed by white majorities: Canada, Australia and New Zealand".
Queer Spaces was commended for “having introduced to the architectural canon what may become a standard reference work about the adaptation of architecture by and in response to the LGBT+ community”, while the judges’s admired Master of the House’s account of the buildings’ architectural origins and its detailing of their subsequent meticulous renovation.
Submissions were invited from publishers last November for books published between January 2022 and June 2023. An exception was made for Richard Murphy’s study, Carlo Scarpa and Castelvecchio Revisited, the product of 30 years’ ongoing research, at one point involving teams of architectural students from Edinburgh University, documenting the refurbishing of a medieval Italian monument in Verona between 1957 and 1975.
A total of 15 books reached the awards scheme’s three shortlists – for monographs, reference books and histories – and these were announced in April. The award is sponsored by Booklaunch.
