Australian buildings feature big on shortlist for World Architecture Festival awards
In the just-released shortlist of contenders in the world’s largest annual architectural competition – the World Architecture Festival that will be held for the 10th time in Berlin in November – Australian buildings are represented in large numbers and across a huge spread of the award categories.
Culled from almost 400 submissions from across the world and from cities where money can be no object when it comes to raising an impressive structure, Australia has made it through the shortlisting process with a disproportionately high representation.
Cox Architecture is shortlisted for the World Architecture Awards, for its Sir Zelman Cowan Centre for Science, at Melbourne’s Scotch College. Photo: John Gollings
Of the 10 shortlisted in the Health category, for instance, four are Australian and include the startling new Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre, by Silver Thomas Hanley, Designinc and McBride Charles Ryan. Standing at an axis point near Melbourne University, the visually exceptional building has become an instant landmark.
In the School category, there are three Australian firms and projects in the mix include Cox Architects’ Sir Zelman Cowan Centre for Science on the Hawthorn campus of Melbourne’s Scotch College. Overall, Cox has four projects in the running, chasing the prizes in five different categories.
Another of their entries, in the Sport category, is the Anna Meares Velodrome at Chandler in Brisbane that will host Commonwealth Games cycling events next year.
Sydney’s Andrew Burgess Architects is another multiple shortlistee with a second nomination in the Schools category. Impressively Perth’s Iredale Pedersen Hook is in a total of five categories covering Health, House, Shopping and Best Use of Colour.
The extension to the Wagga Wagga Courthouse, by TKD Architects. Photo: Brett Boardman
So too is Sydney’s TKD Architects whose imaginative concrete and metal expansion of the 1903 Wagga Wagga Courthouse is in the Civic and Community category, while their Glasshouse at Goonoo Goonoo Station at Tamworth, in NSW, is one of 17 competing in one of the most fascinating categories of all, the New and Old.
Glasshouse at Goonoo Goonoo Station, designed by TKD Architects. Photo: Brett Boardman
A solo but no less significant representative in the Hotel section is the Carr Group’s darkly monumental and zinc clad addition to a brick Federation building on a Mornington Peninsula winery, outside Melbourne, that has become the 46-room boutique hotel Jackalope.
Jackalope Hotel, designed by Carr, is in the running for a World Architecture Award. Photo: Sharyn Cairns
It’s a “monolithic, blackened structure”, says Chris McCue, Carr director of architecture, “that provides a vivid juxtaposition to the rich green, red and silver foliage of the landscape and adjacent vines.”
Perhaps the most extraordinary statistic evident in the shortlist covering over 30 different design divisions is that in the House list, and of 17 contesting the singular residential award, seven are Australian homes. To be fair Japan has some multiples in there too.
By firms such as Tzannes, SJB, Iredale Pedersen Hook, Architects EAT and Andrew Burgess and others, the antipodean residences are scattered across the country but all show confident individuality of a design culture that feels so free to expresses itself with such idiosyncratic exuberance and site responsiveness.
