Booklaunch Architectural Book Awards - The Church Architecture of Richard Twentyman
The Church Architecture of Richard Twentyman by Aidan Ridyard, Partner at Burrell Foley Fischer, and Professor Chris Kennedy has been recognised at Booklaunch Magazine’s 2025 Architectural Book Awards. At the magazine’s Summer Party on 23 July the monograph was announced as the Runner-up in the Architectural Studies category.
Richard Twentyman, the brother of the sculptor Anthony Twentyman, was a successful West Midlands architect based in Wolverhampton who is known particularly for the thirteen churches and chapels he designed between 1937 and 1973.
In January 2019 Aidan presented a short talk about the Churches of Richard Twentyman at the C20th Society (West Midlands) "Architecture Slam" event. Chris was in the audience and had also been researching Twentyman's Churches. Over a friendly chat a shared passion was recognised and a project was born!
“Writers who have trained in architecture rather than history often seem averse to the normal—von Ranke’s wie es eigentlich gewesen—preferring narratives of exceptionalism, invariably false.
By contrast, this book is admirably realistic about the extent of Twentyman’s achievement and how he fitted into the world he occupied. It looks especially at who he worked with and how decisions were made, showing, for example, how there were no sculptures in the niches created for them at the opening of one of his churches because the artist had gone off message and fallen foul of the archdeacon.
Along with helpful architectural drawings (by Ridyard) and luscious photography (by John East), the authors are able to categorise Twentyman’s work into three main phases: basilican monumentality in the interwar-years, a lighter modernism after the war, and a geometrical experimentalism from the 1960s, accompanied by a preference for wide naves without aisles and generous lighting.
…this book is just what architectural history needs more of: a willingness to look at the small and local and everyday, because that is precisely what we know least about and what the big hitters in architectural history care least about.”
Booklaunch is the UK's most widely distributed literary magazine with extracts from the best of new literature across all genres. Each issue includes the widest possible range of intelligent books, showcasing titles from independent publishers, university publishers and self-publishers.
3d Print of St Nicholas Church in Radford, Coventry (now demolished)
