Book featuring Herscher’s work on Chicago’s colonial history wins 2025 Colvin Prize

An anthology of case studies, including work by Taubman College’s Andrew Herscher, was awarded the 2025 Colvin Prize by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain for the year’s outstanding work of reference in architectural history and heritage, broadly defined.

Edited by Tania Sengupta and Stuart King, Reclaiming Colonial Architecture (RIBA Publishing, 2025) unpacks the built inheritances of colonialism and rethinks how architects might understand, narrate, intervene in, or act upon those inheritances. Offering historical background, unpacking key concepts, and presenting thematically organized and multi-scalar urban and architectural case studies, the book showcases how legacies of colonialism are being addressed in real-world instances. Case studies involve works and actions by architects and heritage practitioners, as well as community initiatives and activism.

In his contribution to the book, Herscher and collaborator Ana María León documented “Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center,” a project carried out by their research collective, the Settler Colonial City Project, at the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial in partnership with the American Indian Center of Chicago.

The cover of Reclaiming Colonial Architecture features an image from “Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center”: the large transparent sign reading “You Are Looking at Unceded Land” was mounted in the Center’s monumental windows looking out at Millennium Park, one part of Chicago’s lakefront that was not included in the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. Connecting architectural history to the history of U.S. settler colonialism, the image inspires reflection on architecture’s ongoing participation in colonial extraction and violence, one of the book’s larger ambitions as a whole.