Sydney
may be obsessed by bricks and mortar but it is behind Melbourne and Brisbane in
terms of challenging, innovative architecture.
That appears to be the message from this year’s National
Architecture Awards, where the top honours went to a “testosterone-charged”
building at a Brisbane girls school and a
strikingly avant-garde house on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.
Buildings in NSW won just seven of the 31 awards and
commendations handed out by the Australian Institute of Architects at a
ceremony in Adelaide
last night. CarriageWorks – an arts
venue housed in converted railway workshops at Eveleigh, the EDO
apartment building in Woolloomooloo and The Wharf, the headquarters of the
Sydney Theatre Company, were among the state’s winners.
Brisbane won the nation’s top
architecture prize for the second year running, the Sir Zelman Cowen Award for
Public Architecture, which went to the Cherrell Hirst Creative Learning Centre
at Brisbane Girls Grammar School.
The top honour for residential architecture, the Robin Boyd Award, went to the
Klein Bottle House, a bold structure on the Mornington Peninsula.
Houses on the peninsula, an hour’s drive from Melbourne, have won the
Robin Boyd Award for the past three years.
Alec Tzannes, the chairman of the judging panel, said the
quality and diversity of the winners suggested that Australian architecture was
thriving. He questioned the notion that Sydney
was falling behind the other states.
“It’s not a bad year for NSW,” he said. “It
just so happens you have these incredible shots out of the blue from Melbourne
and Brisbane.”
Mr Tzannes said the skill and imagination of Sydney’s architects was
equal to the best designers anywhere in the world, but he conceded the city
might have “a cultural issue in terms of the commissioning of the
buildings”.
The EDO apartment building, designed by the Sydney firm Stanisic Associates, and CarriageWorks, by Tonkin Zulaikha Greer, were
“really innovative”.
CarriageWorks, which won the Lachlan Macquarie Award for
Heritage, was so good it almost won a commercial architecture award as well, Mr
Tzannes said.
Several other NSW buildings also won awards yesterday. Leura
House, designed by James Stockwell, won a residential award and Rouse Hill Town
Centre won the the Walter Burley Griffin Award for Urban Design.
The Joern Utzon
Award for International Architecture went to the National Aquatic Centre in Beijing, known as the Water Cube, designed by a team led
by the Sydney
firm PTW.