St Kilda pier wins peak Victorian architecture award as judges praise playful and ‘deeply civic’ design

St Kilda’s summer playground was extended with the suburb’s redesigned pier. Photograph: Peter Clarke

“[They] feature beloved landmarks that have transcended their function as a piece of infrastructure,” he said in a statement. “We saw multiple community projects that are delightful sites of human congregation where community-centric design has been at the forefront, taking prosaic pieces of existing architecture and making them a place of recreation.”

Even sites with a “grim history” had been “utterly transformed with deft hands,” Knott said.

One site from a bygone era is the former Sunbury Lunatic Asylum, built in 1879, renamed the Sunbury Hospital for the Insane in 1905 and again as the Caloola Training Centre in 1985.

After being part of the Victoria University campus for almost two decades, it has now been transformed into the Sunbury community arts and cultural precinct, a project that won a clutch of gongs, including the John George Knight award for heritage and the award for interior architecture.

The architects of Sunbury’s art precinct were awarded for their skill at turning an institution that restricted human interaction into a space that fosters it. Photograph: Peter Bennetts

The judges praised the design by Architecture Associates with Openwork as an adaptive reuse of an institutional complex that had previously been defined by human containment.

“A fine balance is required when a building designed to restrict and remove persons from society becomes one that celebrates community coming together,” the judges’ statement said.

‘To let the building’s story unfold … sometimes directly, sometimes by shadowing the past … is a skill that has many facets. The architects utilise all these skills.”

The push to convert under utilised urban spaces into functional and flexible workspaces was evident in Fieldwork’s design of 65 Dover Street in Cremorne, which claimed the Sir Osborn McCutcheon award for commercial architecture.

Fieldwork’s project at 65 Dover Street in Cremorne features a rooftop recreation space for workers. Photograph: Tom Ross

Fieldwork was commended for its “elegant and nuanced” response to the site, which includes a rooftop recreation space for workers with a half-size basketball court.

“65 Dover St sets a new benchmark for commercial architecture of this scale – integrous, gracious and refined,” judges said.

The Henry Bastow award for educational architecture went to Baldasso Cortese’s Edmund Rice centre at Emmanuel College. Clad in Colorbond manor red, the Warrnambool campus learning hub is organised into three learning domains – wisdom, communication and discovery – all facing into a central courtyard.

The Edmund Rice centre at Emmanuel College in Warrnambool won the award for educational architecture. Photograph: Dan Farrar

In the residential categories, the winners were dominated by sustainable refits of heritage structures over the traditional “knockdown rebuild” strategy.

Robert Simeoni Architects’ Palmerston Street house in Calrton took out the heritage award and the John and Phyllis Murphy award for alterations and additions.

Judges admired the architects’ reimagining of Palmerston Street house, a former 1870s hotel in Carlton. Photograph: Trevor Mein

The architects’ design was admired for its restrained reimagining of the former 1870s hotel, while negotiating rising construction costs and material shortages.

“It works directly, honestly and poetically within these limitations to find a spatial and material language that delights in its own economy,” the judges said.

For new builds, the Harold Desbrowe Annear award went to Edition Offices’ “House in a Garden”, a striking, elevated timber form nestled into the canopy of the Birrarung flood plain, giving “a cinematic sense of immersion within a highly choreographed landscape”.

Edition Offices’ winning ‘House in a Garden’. Photograph: Australian Institute of Architects