James Stevens Curl wins 2019 Arthur Ross Award for Excellence

James Stevens Curl (photo by Lara Platman)

Congratulations to James Stevens Curl, a frequent contributor to New English Review, and author of Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism. He has won The Institute of Classical Architecture & Art’s 2019 Arthur Ross Award for Excellence in the Classical Tradition for History and Writing.

From the ICAA website:

HISTORY & WRITING | Professor James Stevens Curl, United Kingdom

Professor James Stevens Curl is a leading British architectural historian, and read for his Doctorate at University College London. He was twice Visiting Fellow at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, and is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Fellow of the Societies of Antiquaries of London and of Scotland, and a Fellow of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland. His many publications include studies of Classical, Georgian, and Victorian architecture, the Egyptian Revival, the City of London’s Plantation in Ulster, Kensal Green Cemetery, London’s Spas, Wells, and Pleasure-Gardens, and Freemasonry & the Enlightenment.

His Oxford Dictionary of Architecture was published by Oxford University Press in 2015, and hailed as ‘the finest in existence’, deserving of the ‘highest praise’. His most recent book, Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism, published by Oxford University Press in 2018, is a passionate and deeply researched critique of why towns today look and are so unpleasant.

Professor James Stevens Curl lives in Holywood, County Down, in Northern Ireland, where he contributes regular reviews and articles to refereed journals and gives well-received public lectures.