Congratulations Matthew Seaborn, Donald Insall Associates and The Whitworth Partnership,
Private Chapel, Suffolk – Shortlisted for the Royal Institute of British Architects East Awards 2026
There is something faintly improbable about a domestic chapel in rural Suffolk entering the machinery of the Royal Institute of British Architects awards. It is not a building that clamours for attention. It does not trade in spectacle. It sits in fields shaped by wind and weather, and it waits.
And yet here it is, shortlisted.
The chapel’s form suggests an upturned boat, and in Suffolk that gesture carries more than picturesque association. It reaches back, whether consciously or not, to a theology shaped by tide and timber. Irish monasticism, ascetic and mobile, was carried not by cathedrals but by hulls. Monks travelled as missionaries in small vessels, crossing uncertain waters with manuscripts and memory as their cargo, bearers of text and tradition. The boat was both transport and metaphor, vessel and passage.
The boat form in Suffolk gathers quiet resonance. It is not theatrical, but it is composed. The roof arcs with the assurance of a hull turned skyward. The tapering round tower leans slightly, like a mast arrested mid-gesture. It feels less like imitation and more like inheritance.
Material is where the argument becomes decisive. Solid masonry. Norfolk flint, Purbeck, Portland, Clipsham. Stone as substance, not surface. Flint holds shadow in its fractured skin; limestone absorbs and returns light with measured generosity. This is architecture that understands weight. One might call it ascetic. No indulgence. Discipline and careful, precise, attention.
The technical challenges are real. A leaning tower introduces geometric complexity that demands precision. Every coping stone cut across two planes to follow curvature exactly, a form of intellectual honesty.
Dense with interlace and geometry, this is not ornament for ornament’s sake. More a proclamation. A visual theology. A via media that fuses symbolic form into a disciplined whole. A place where crafts converge, where creativity is honoured through exacting attention to line.
This chapel fuses inherited craft with contemporary engineering. It demonstrates a middle way between nostalgia and abstraction. The calibrated coping stones, the disciplined geometry, all speak of a building that knows what it is doing and why.
As a photographer, I look for coherence. For alignment between intention and execution. For buildings that withstand the long stare of a lens. This chapel does not dissolve under scrutiny. Rather it basks in it’s own simple splendour.
If it progresses further toward the RIBA Stirling Prize, it will be because it sustains that coherence when examined without romance. If it does not, it remains what it already is: a vessel of stone in a Suffolk field, carrying forward a quiet proclamation that architecture, can still unite devotion, knowledge and craft in a single, disciplined act.
