Yitpi Yartapuultiku (The Soul of Port Adelaide) | Ashley Halliday Architects together with the Yitpi Yartapuultiku Aboriginal Working Group and Wax Design

The Jack McConnell Award for Public Architecture

A standout project of masterful execution, Yitipi Yartapuultiku (The Soul of Port Adelaide) is a reminder of architecture’s capacity to provide for both people and place, via themes of repair, reciprocity and relationships.

The project’s deep engagement with cultural topographies and shared healing is delivered with an understated, sophisticated hand. The Jury commends the purposeful, reductive design and considered materiality. Disciplined tectonic resolution simultaneously allows space for delight in stories, cultural meaning, exploration and connection with landscape.

Warm and sheltered, yet open to the outdoors, the building embraces a whole-of-site experience, commanding a presence from all sides. An exemplary consultation process and advocacy for time breathes effortlessness into several project aspects, including the seamless arrangement of cultural areas alongside public performance, hospitality and amenity spaces.

Realised as a Living Cultural Centre, the project revitalises the site and creates a unique public destination for experiential learning in indoor and outdoor environments. Flexible planning and multipurpose spaces allow for gathering, exhibition, cultural activity and performance. Orchestrated view corridors, combined with material restraint and interpretive moments, invite curiosity and wandering.

COLORBOND Award for Steel Architecture

The Yitpi Yartapuultiku Cultural Centre demonstrates an exemplary and highly resolved use of steel architecture, where materiality, structure and cultural narrative are brought together with clarity and restraint. The project employs COLORBOND® steel not simply as cladding, but as a defining architectural element that contributes to the building’s identity, durability and connection to the landscape.

Robust yet finely detailed, the steel envelope provides a unifying language across the project, allowing the architecture to sit confidently within its exposed coastal setting while responding sensitively to Country. Its tonal restraint and crafted expression create a building that feels simultaneously grounded and contemporary, balancing civic presence with cultural humility.

The use of steel enables expansive sheltering forms, deep overhangs and seamless transitions between indoor and outdoor spaces, supporting the project’s role as a living cultural centre. Carefully considered detailing and junctions reinforce the project’s sense of permanence and robustness, while allowing the architecture to be maintained while ageing gracefully over time.

Through a sophisticated integration of material performance, construction resolution and architectural expression, Yitpi Yartapuultiku is considered a compelling and deserving recipient of the COLORBOND® Award for Steel Architecture.

The Derrick Kendrick Award for Sustainable Architecture

Enhanced by an extensive participatory design journey with Local Elders and Custodians, Yitpi Yartapuultiku is exemplary in boosting social, environmental, ecological and cultural understanding in a living building environment.
Situated on the lands of the Kaurna People, the building is carefully sited, gently curving around a central performance space, with the building’s form and orientation framing important cultural markers within the site and beyond. The arrival sequence is defined by a series of meandering paths, culminating in a lifted façade that reveals the surrounding landscape and vistas of the revitalised shoreline. The restrained earthy colour palette ensures the landscape remains the focal point.
Honouring Indigenous approaches to building, the design prioritises passive thermal strategies. Wrapped in a resilient outer shell and natural inner skin, the building is softened by deep shading and a perforated veil, strengthening the relationship between indoor and outdoor spaces.
Anchored by the performance space, Yitpi Yartapuultiku has become a hub for immersive learning, cultural engagement and social connection, sparking a renewed sense of pride across the community. The design unfolds as a site-wide exploration of landscape, ecology and architecture, giving voice to the ideas and values shaped with the Custodians and Elders through a shared design journey.
 

SA Architecture Medal

Yitpi Yartapuultiku is a deeply purposeful project that demonstrates the transformative capacity of Country-centred design. At a time when Australia continues to grapple with reconciliation and the role of the built environment in healing and truth-telling, the project offers a powerful example of what meaningful public architecture can be.

Warm and sheltered yet open to the landscape, the building embraces a whole-of-site experience with a grounded and confident presence. An exemplary consultation process and advocacy for time, care and cultural engagement have resulted in an architecture that feels effortless in its resolution, seamlessly integrating cultural, performance, hospitality and public gathering spaces.

Realised as a living cultural centre, the project revitalises a difficult and contaminated site, transforming it into a place of pride, learning, ecological renewal and connection to Country. Flexible planning, material restraint and carefully framed moments of interpretation invite curiosity, reflection and gathering.

Yitpi Yartapuultiku is architecture that understands its role as host rather than object, foregrounding culture, landscape and community with generosity and clarity. The jury considers it a standout work of public architecture and a worthy recipient of the SA Architecture Medal.