REGIONAL PRIZE
Regional Prize: Pioneer Museum Plaza, Jeparit - NMBW Architecture Studio + Urban Design, RMIT University
The Regional Prize is awarded to a small project in a rural township of 300 people.
With a minimal budget, the forecourt design at Jeparit Pioneer Museum provides a new gathering place for the local community and destination to connect with local history.
The project, stage one of an impressive urban framework, is a small set of parts: a fence, picnic tables, seating and signage.
Through the use of amplified local iconography, the parts are adapted with available technology and elegant detail resolution.
This seems particularly fitting for a pioneer museum that houses a history of ingenuity and invention.
Regional Award: Albury Library Museum - Ashton Raggatt McDougall
The Albury Library and Museum is successful for bringing big city architecture into a growing regional centre.
It is both flamboyant and heroic, providing an energetic re-envisaging of the city’s civic centre - XXXX marks the spot.
With this building, ARM has successfully redefined the Library and Museumin the life of the city; no longer the quiet repository, it has become an energetic, interactive hub which comfortably integrates traditional and digital media forms.
The building is clearly placed in its context through ARM’s use of local, regional and international references.
The resulting series of disparate elements is skillfully woven into a challenging composition, grand yet intimate, playful, yet dignified.
MELBOURNE PRIZE
The Vaults Precinct, Princes Walk, Federation Square - Six Degrees
The reactivation of the old and neglected Vaults beneath the southern edge of the Federation Square precinct has produced a modest, yet highly considered reworking of this historical structure.
The construction, utilizing raw materials of steel, timber and glass compliments the bluestone and contributes to a robust, everyday and inclusive environment which attracts a wide range of city dwellers.
The place experience is about the essence of Melbourne, the City, the Gardens, the Yarra River, Princes Bridge and bluestone.
This environment has a profound but everyday public accessibility through a combination of materiality, formal composition and programmatic arrangement.
This prime city asset provides another successful piece of the jigsaw linking the City of Melbourne with the river and its parks
COLORBOND ® STEEL AWARD
Albury Library Museum - Ashton Raggatt McDougall
This work, cobbled from a scattershot of sources derived from reminiscences and familiar elements from the Albury region, has been judiciously choreographed to form a powerful and expressively unrestrained architectural ensemble.
A steel skeleton has been wrought to make its form and where steel is given expression, the expressions refer to both the delicate and heavy steel engineering associated with local rail bridge construction, which was fundamental to the development of the Albury region.
This award, which celebrates the use of steel and Colorbond, and in this case also celebrating Australian regional culture, was awarded to the Albury Library and Museum.
25 YEAR AWARD FOR ENDURING ARCHITECTURE
Murray Valley Private Hospital, former Clyde Cameron College - Kevin Borland
The tunnel-view down the precast concrete pipe cloisters of Clyde Cameron College, interspersed with dappled effects from triangular-section skylights and capped with shiny rows of pipes, is one of the more arresting images of Australian architecture. In photographs, however, it is sometimes easy for the drama of this scene to overshadow the many other qualities of this rambling and low-rise public building complex, which makes an extensive series of courtyards through a treed watercourse and around a pre-existing farmhouse.
The use of concrete blocks, light weight glazing bar sections, beautiful large scale timber trusses and robust expressed concrete details work together with the gutsiness of stronger geometric elements, the coloured expression of services and the angular facets of the plan to form a strong but informal institutional image. A quirky domestic scale of detailing runs through all of this and reinforces the episodic qualities of the plan.
As Conrad Hamann has noted, this meandering assemblage of buildings, perhaps more than any other of Borland’s public works achieves a type of democratic and ‘open’ monumentality - one which celebrates events and experience and is expressed through raw and gestural dynamism rather than through appeals to gravitas or permanence. This spirit and Borland’s ethos hold a profound and lasting influence.
BATES SMART AWARD FOR ARCHITECTURE IN THE MEDIA
State Award: Homes in the Sky, Caroline Butler-Brown & Charles Pickett
This relevant and original book describes the history of the Australian apartment and is a useful contribution to a society attempting to move away from single dwellings as the dominant mass housing type. It is an accessible and well-illustrated text featuring revealing historical images and drawings.
‘Homes in the Sky’ makes clear that Australians can, and have, lived in apartments for a long time and that the ‘Australian Dream’ of land based home ownership is not universal. It features examples of many good but ‘ordinary’ buildings and covers a history of backlash to apartments in Australia, one that continues today.
The book provides an informed history and contemporary commentary on the issues surrounding medium density living in this country.
Whilst the cover can be seen to be misleading and perhaps undersells the depth of the research contained within, it makes clear the book is aimed at a broad market, which is to be applauded.
National Award: Gunyah Goondie + Wurley, The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia, Paul Memmott
No citation available at this time.
PRESIDENTS PRIZE
John Gollings, architectural photographer
The President’s Prize was created in 2000 by Ian McDougall in his term of office. Its purpose: to ‘acknowledge a life of work in architecture, a contribution to the community through design, through activism, and through education’.
A generous award, to date it has heralded the work of significant architects, educators, architectural events and an informed advocate of good design.
Our 2008 recipient is equally deserving of the honour.
An outstanding architectural photographer and outstanding friend to architecture, his seminal and ongoing contributions have already been recognised by elevation to Honorary Fellowship of the RAIA in 2003.
None of us will forget his groundbreaking imagery of Peter Corrigan’s projects: The Church of The Resurrection and Freedom Club Childcare Centre in Keysborough from the seventies, and Carlton’s Kay Street Housing in the early eighties.
These images possess a striking luminosity. They are surreal. Priests, kangaroos and kids fly across them, releasing the expression of the architecture in a startling way.
Through his self-described ‘symbiotic’ collaboration between architect and photographer, he sought to unlock the essence of the building with his images. And in realising this vision, redefined the way the sculpture and presence of architecture could be portrayed by two dimensional imagery.
Then, as now, his work narrates the unspoken spirit of the architecture; gives us clues; and expresses the architect’s inner feelings with revelatory clarity.
He is technically brilliant, even making his own lens if that’s what will nail the shot. He has an unnervingly creative eye - and his hero shots are legendary. He can improvise under any conditions, from the jungle of Phnom Phen to the helicopter skyways over Melbourne. He continues to document the evolving story of architecture and maintains a high international profile. Yet he has also helped promote young architectural careers - at times during recession, without payment.
At a critical juncture in Melbourne’s development - when the necessary role of the architect in shaping our city needs to be loudly announced - his contribution, as an ambassador of architecture to a very wide audience, assumes even greater importance.
It is for the sum total of all this - for the way he has tirelessly, and with great humility, enriched our architectural environment- that the 2008 President’s Prize is awarded to John Gollings.
Karl Fender
President, RAIA Victoria
Australian Institute of Architects | Media Unit
Ms Kirsten Trengove, tel 0439 555 427, kirsten.trengove@raia.com.au
Ms Trish Croaker, tel 0408 756 163, trish.croaker@raia.com.au
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