The State of Things: On the 2026 Victorian Architecture Awards

Jury Chair Simon Knott observed that the residential winners were dominated by projects that honour a site's history, modernising heritage homes through precise edits rather than demolition. The same can be said of the broader list, which outlines project after project that ask what it means to build with what already exists. Retention as an act of care. Adaptation as cultural argument. The new building as the latest chapter in a story that predates it.

The Victorian Architecture Medal, the highest honour the Victorian Chapter confers, went to the St Kilda Pier Redevelopment by Jackson Clements Burrows Architects with Site Office Landscape Architecture and AW Maritime. It also took the Joseph Reed Award for Urban Design and the Dimity Reed Melbourne Prize, making it the undisputed project of the year. Twenty years in the making, the pier redevelopment demonstrates what patient civic ambition looks like when it eventually lands. The jury described a project that transforms the linear experience of a pier into a place of gathering and lingering: beach-towel-scaled steps arcing toward the city skyline, balustrades calibrated to support fishing rods and reclining bodies, seating made from reclaimed pier timbers, and viewing platforms for the resident penguin colony. It is infrastructure that has absorbed its own history and given it back to the city as pleasure.

The Sunbury Community Arts and Cultural Precinct by Architecture Associates with Openwork, a former asylum reimagined as a place of community creativity, was the other project of the evening, collecting the John George Knight Award for Heritage, an Award for Interior Architecture, a Commendation for Public Architecture, and the EmAGN Project Award, recognising the emerging architects who led it. The jury's citation for the interior award speaks of a project that peels back layers to reveal history and community embedded within the building. It stands as an archaeology of place and a reminder that Architecture Associates and Openwork's deep understanding of landscape, memory, and civic space makes them among the most important collaborative voices in Victorian architecture right now.

Balam Balam Place by Kennedy Nolan, Finding Infinity, and Openwork gathered perhaps the most varied suite of recognition of any project: awards across Heritage, Public Architecture, Urban Design, and a Commendation in both Sustainable Architecture and the COLORBOND Steel Architecture category. The Brunswick precinct, which is centred on the restored Sherwood House and deliberately refuses to privilege the colonial relic above the layers of contested history around it, is the kind of work that reframes what heritage means. The jury acknowledges its encouragement to rethink how we read, interpret and design for heritage in all its forms in contemporary Australia.

In residential architecture, the winners collectively describe a generation of architects working with particular intelligence on the question of the existing house. Robert Simeoni Architects' Palmerston Street House took both the John and Phyllis Murphy Award for Residential Architecture (Alterations and Additions) and a Heritage Award, a sweeping recognition that feels entirely warranted for a project that holds the 1870s hotel, the 50s and 60s migrant alterations, and Simeoni's own intervention in equal regard, stitching three eras together into something that reads as a whole. Topology Studio's Eleanor received an Award for Residential Architecture (Alterations and Additions), recognised for its careful reconfiguration of a Victorian townhouse to meet the needs of aging-in-place, without disrupting the heritage streetscape.

Edition Office took the Harold Desbrowe-Annear Award for Residential Architecture (New Houses) for House in a Garden, a home elevated above the Birrarung flood plain and interwoven with tree canopies in a way the jury described as cinematic. Hislop Hill House by Clare Cousins Architects, also awarded in the new houses category, was cited for its fenceless native-garden streetscape, its terraced floors negotiating steep topography, and its integration of interior and exterior, with what the jury called assurance that never resorts to the obvious.

The multiple housing category was, as Knott suggested, a highlight, demonstrating density done well across a range of scales, typologies and communities. 9 Wilson Avenue by MA+Co and developed with Neometro took the Best Overend Award, the category's highest honour. The twin-building arrangement ensures dual aspects for every apartment; the open-air bridges turn circulation into social infrastructure; and the mix of loft dwellings alongside specialist disability apartments makes for a project that takes the everyday experience of apartment living seriously as an architectural problem and solves it with both rigour and warmth. The jury's recognition of the building's sculptural central courtyard as a social heart speaks to the positive impact that multi-residential work can have on a neighbourhood and its residents.

Kennedy Nolan's Nightingale Umarkoo Wayi, Six Degrees Architects' Merri Northcote, Caleb Smith Architect's Northumberland Road Community Housing, and Studio Bright's SDA Housing Project all received awards in the same category within a field that suggests the state of medium-density housing in Victoria is genuinely advancing, architect by architect, block by block.

Other standouts of this year’s Awards include Fieldwork's 65 Dover Street, Cremorne, which took the Sir Osborn McCutcheon Award for Commercial Architecture, the jury describing the building as integrous, gracious and refined, a rare combination of adjectives that commercial architecture doesn’t earn often. Wardle's Yiaga, a skilful reinvention of the Pavilion Café in the Fitzroy Gardens, received a Commercial Architecture Award and an Interior Architecture Commendation, cited by the jury for its ability to elevate dining into a cultural and spatial experience while revitalising an important civic site for contemporary public life. The building, nestled into its garden setting, celebrates Australian craftsmanship at every scale. Kosloff Architecture's 24/7 Latelab at Swinburne received both an Educational Architecture Award and an Interior Architecture Award in recognition of a project that is, according to the jury, visibly loved and occupied by students, which is perhaps the most honest measure of an educational building's success.

The Maggie Edmond Award for Enduring Architecture, given to the Fairfield Park Amphitheatre, designed by Maggie Edmond for Edmond and Corrigan in 1985 and crafted from recycled bluestone salvaged from Melbourne's inner-city gutters, is a reminder that the awards programme is a steward of institutional memory. Some buildings outlast the conversations that produced them. The amphitheatre, built through a work-for-the-dole scheme by unemployed workers trained in stone-cutting, has been hosting multicultural performances and community gatherings for forty years, earning it recognition.

In considering the 2026 Victorian Architecture Awards as a whole, a disciplined conversation emerges about what to keep, what to transform, how to house people with dignity, and how to make places that communities actually claim. The jury's observation that sites with a grim history were utterly transformed with deft hands and given new life as public hubs catches something real about this moment in time, this vernacular, reminding us that at its best, architecture is a form of civic optimism.