Lifetime Achievement Award 2018

TAG has given its inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award to Professor David Watkin.

David Watkin is an architectural historian. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Professor Emeritus of the History of Architecture in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge. He has also taught at the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture.

Watkin is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He is a former Vice-Chairman of the Georgian Group,and was also a member of the Historic Buildings Council and its successor bodies in English Heritage from 1980 to 1995.

His love of classical architecture is in strong opposition to most contemporary academics. A significant part of life’s work has been the championing of new classical architecture and questioning the false certainties of the modern movement. He has written extensively about classical architecture, perhaps more than anyone else of his generation. As well as writing about historic masters like Athenian Stuart and Sir John Soane, he has also found time to concentrate on modern classicists including John Simpson, Quinlan and Francis Terry.

What makes David distinct from his peers is his support of architects practicing in a classical style in the modern world. Architectural historians almost invariably favour the modern style and those who do accept the practice of modern classicism will only condone the most reticent examples. David by contrast happily champions the most extravagant of new classical buildings and he is generous in his praise of all types of classicism. His own personal taste is for the regency style, particularly John Soane, but this does not prevent him from being excited by baroque and rococo flourishes. This genuine enthusiasm for the new classicism combined with his academic authority makes him a unique figure from whom all members of TAG have benefited and a fitting recipient of TAG’s first lifetime achievement award.