A shiny tower, a rusty shed and a toilet block on shortlist for 2022 Victorian Architecture Awards

Bought out to Melbourne as a pre-fab during the Gold Rush – a time when the solution to massive population pressure was to bring buildings in as flat-packs – the 1850s Keilor Police Hut that housed the constabulary keeping an eye on the road-jamming digger traffic, has been restored by Andronas Conservation Architects to show its rudimentary accommodation.

The corrugated iron and timber hut, which is in the Heritage sector of the 14 category Victorian AIA awards, was used until 1873. Two fireplaces suggest it was both residence and office. By the 1940s it was indeed a shed and sometime later was prudently dismantled and put into storage to save it from vandalism. Good save.

Another salvage project, the reborn La Mama Theatre rebuild is almost as humble in scale. But in raising this Carlton crucible of modern Australian stage performance from the ashes of the 2018 fire, architect and sometime La Mama artist Meg White, and Cottee Parker Architecture have brilliantly maintained the raffish spirit of the old brick building.

So cherished was this humble playhouse – launched in 1967 – that the public contributed $3.4 million to see it rise again as a rehearsal space, bar, box office and green room.
La Mama is up for the Melbourne Prize and also in the Public category. That puts it up against Terroir’s sensational new Puffing Billy Lakeside Visitor Centre at Emerald.

This is a new discovery centre for one of regional Melbourne’s most loved tourist attractions. Characteristically, Terroir has made it startling as a black building with an erratic lineal form.

The interiors are timber-lined and voluminous and why wouldn’t one of the main spaces have a little engine-that-could appearing to burst through the wall? Terroir has a track record of bold and different projects. Its amazing Penguin Parade Visitor Centre at Phillip Island won numerous awards including the Chicago Athenaeum’s International Architecture Award.

The Puffing Billy centre – which is a stop on the line of the popular narrow-gauge rail journey – is also competing in the Regional and Colorbond sections of one of the biggest award shortlisting for the Victorian chapter for years. It has 125 on the shortlist.

In the Education category is a highly unusual building made by Grimshaw for highly specialised learning. With subterranean developments such as road and rail links more routinely going underground, the Victorian Tunnelling Centre has been made to feature exact-scale replica tunnels so students can see what such constructions entail.

One tunnel forms the arrival or entry space to this new facility on the Holmesglen’s Chadstone Campus and it has been lined with anodised aluminium panels.

Also sort of promoting education – because it is more than subliminally advertising science in its facade – is another school building. But this one, by the always innovative Harrison and White, is competing in the Small Projects.

It’s a new toilet block at the Good Samaritan Primary School in outer northern Melbourne and incised into the timber battens on the exterior are the genetic sex designations of XX and XY on the toilet block “boxes” that are divided by a covered breezeway.

Clever too is that the neat little facility provides generous overhead shelter for milling kids and an implied outdoor stage space with nearby seating.