St Kilda Pier Wins Top Victorian Architecture Medal
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- St Kilda pier won the Victorian architecture medal at the 2026 Australian Institute of Architects' Victorian awards — the $53m project by Jackson Clements Burrows Architects with Site Office Landscape Architecture and AW Maritime, which judges called "playful, social and deeply civic"
- The pier also took the Dimity Reed Melbourne prize and the Joseph Reed award for urban design, after co-winning the built outcomes category at the national Urban Design awards in March
- The pier project weathered controversy including an aborted Parks Victoria push for pay-per-view access to its resident penguin colony, with the Victorian jury praising its balance of tourists, locals, fishers, ferries, marina users and penguins
- Sunbury community arts and cultural precinct won the John George Knight heritage award and the interior architecture award for adaptive reuse of a former asylum-turned-hospital-turned-training-centre, designed by Architecture Associates with Openwork
- Fieldwork's 65 Dover Street in Cremorne took the Sir Osborn McCutcheon commercial architecture award, featuring a rooftop recreation space with a half-size basketball court for workers
- Baldasso Cortese's Edmund Rice Centre at Emmanuel College in Warrnambool won the Henry Bastow educational architecture award, clad in Colorbond manor red and organized around three learning domains facing a central courtyard
- Residential winners were dominated by sustainable refits of heritage structures over traditional knockdown rebuilds, with jury chair Simon Knott saying standout projects transcended "purely utilitarian briefs" and became "beloved landmarks"
Why it matters: Jury chair Simon Knott said this year's standout Victorian projects transcended "purely utilitarian briefs" and became "beloved landmarks" and "sites of human congregation" — even sites with "grim history" had been "utterly transformed." For practitioners, the awards show the state's top juries now reward projects that balance infrastructure demands with human gathering, from a $53m contested pier to a former asylum reborn as an arts precinct.
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