Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press) by Basile Baudez has been shortlisted for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion.  Awarded since 1959, the prize is given annually to the author whose literary work provides an outstanding contribution to the study of architectural history. The work must be written by a British author or deal with the architectural history of the British Isles or the Commonwealth. Named after the mother of the American architectural historian Henry Russell-Hitchcock, the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion depicts James ‘Athenian’ Stuart in a Wedgwood portrait. 

In Inessential Colors, Baudez traces the use of color in European architectural drawings and prints, revealing how this phenomenon reflected the professional anxieties of an emerging professional practice that was simultaneously art and science.