The Alice Davis Hitchcock award for 2019 has been awarded to Dr Conor Lucey for his book Building Reputations. Architecture and the artisan, 1750–1830, published by Manchester University Press.

Taking a cue from a burgeoning revisionist scholarship devoted to early modern vernacular architectures and their relationship to the classical canon, this book rehabilitates the reputations of a representative if misunderstood historic building typology – the brick terraced house – and the artisan communities of bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers responsible for its design and construction. Opening with a cultural history of the building tradesman in terms of his reception within contemporary architectural discourse, subsequent chapters consider the design, decoration and marketing of the town house in the principal cities of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Atlantic world. Drawing on extensive primary source material, from property deeds and architectural drawings to trade cards and newspaper advertising, Building Reputations considers the artisan as both a figure of building production and an agent of architectural taste.

Dr Conor Lucey is Assistant Professor in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin. Dr Lucey is a former editor of Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, the Journal of the Irish Georgian Society, and currently sits on the Desmond Guinness Scholarship committee. He is the 37th and current president of the Royal Society of Antiquaries.

The ADH award is given annually to the author of a literary work which, in the opinion of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain award committee, provides an outstanding contribution to the study or knowledge of architectural history. The work must be by a British author (or authors), or deal with an aspect of the architectural history of the British Isles or the Commonwealth, and have been published within the past two years.