ST. THOMAS CHAPEL WINS SUPREME AWARD

Hooray! The St. Thomas Chapel has won the Supreme Award in the inau­gural Inte­rior Awards as well as win­ning the Cul­ture and Civic cat­e­gory award.

Thanks to every­one at AGM and Inte­ri­ors Mag­a­zine for a great awards pro­gram and a fan­tas­tic party!

Judges Cita­tion:

The Cul­ture & Civic sec­tion of this awards pro­gramme was vigourously con­tested; there was an embar­rass­ment of riches and, in truth, the judges thought that each of the final­ists could have gone on to win the main award. Ulti­mately, it was a once-in-a-lifetime eccle­si­as­ti­cal project that pulled through: a project with a long, inter­est­ing nar­ra­tive that begins in the 19th cen­tury, involves foren­sic archi­tec­ture, restora­tion and, to get a lit­tle bit New Tes­ta­ment on it, resurrection.

How­ever, this project was not just a rebuild­ing of some­thing that had gone before; there was finesse in recom­po­si­tion, and care­ful mate­r­ial selec­tion, includ­ing some bold choices – onyx mar­ble, for instance, com­prises the ‘lantern’ that frames the top of the chapel. The chapel is one part of this project; there are two ‘con­tain­ers’ in St Matthews. Some­thing old, which started life in the bow­els of an ocean-riding mis­sion­ary ship, is bal­anced by some­thing quite new, an amenity build­ing like no other. It is a kitchen which the forward-looking church can look to sub­sidise income that will help care for the won­der­ful her­itage enve­lope. There are many admirable aspects to this project, includ­ing its human scale and clar­ity of thought. It’s a sophis­ti­cated work where the mod­ern and func­tional sit respect­fully along­side the revered and historic.