St Kilda Pier wins pinnacle of Victorian architecture award as judges praise playful and ‘deeply urban’ design | Build

A redesigned St Kilda Pier has added more accolades to its thriving trophy cabinet, scooping some of the best gongs in the 2026 Australian Institute of Architects Victorian Awards.

The $53 million Victorian Government project by Jackson Clements Burrows Architects, along with Site Office Landscape Architecture and AW Maritime, was awarded the Victorian Architecture Medal on Friday, the award given to the most outstanding project of the year.

It also won the Dimitty Reed Melbourne Award and the Joseph Reed Urban Design Award. In March, it was co-winner in the Built Results category at the National Urban Design Awards.

The project has had its share of controversy, including an aborted attempt by Parks Victoria to introduce pay-per-view to the pier’s resident penguin colony. On Friday, a Victorian jury praised the project for successfully balancing the competing demands of tourists, locals, fishermen, ferries, marina users – and penguins.

The judges said: “The project demonstrates how complex infrastructure can become playful, social and deeply civic.”

Building on recent National and NSW Awards, sustainability, resource efficiency and community-focused overall design took center stage in the Victoria Awards.

Jury chair, architect and academic Simon Knott, said this year’s outstanding projects were defined by their ability to go beyond purely utilitarian briefs and prioritize human interaction.

“[They] “It features beloved landmarks that have transcended their function as a piece of infrastructure,” he said in a statement. “We’ve seen many community projects that are delightful sites for human gathering where community-focused design has been at the forefront, taking sundry pieces of existing architecture and making them a place for entertaining.”

Even sites with a “dismal history” have been “entirely transformed by skilled 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 Caloula Training Center in 1985.

Having been part of the Victoria University campus for nearly two decades, it has now been transformed into the Sunbury Community Arts and Culture Precinct, a project that has won a host of gongs, including the John George Knight Heritage Award and the Interior Architecture Award.

Judges praised the design submitted by Architecture Associates with Openwork as an adaptive reuse of an institutional complex previously defined by human containment.

“A delicate balance is required when a building designed to restrict people and keep them out of the community becomes a building that celebrates the community coming together,” the judges’ statement said.

“Letting the story of a building unfold… sometimes directly, sometimes by shadowing the past… is a skill that has many facets. Architects use all of these skills.

The drive to transform underutilized urban spaces into functional and flexible workspaces was evident in Fieldwork’s design for 65 Dover Street in Cremorne, which won the Sir Osborne McCutcheon Award for Commercial Architecture.

Fieldwork was praised for its “elegant and precise” response to the site, which includes a rooftop recreational space for workers with a half-sized basketball court.

“65 Dover St sets a new standard for commercial architecture of this scale – integrated, generous and refined,” the judges said.

The Henri Bastow Prize for Educational Architecture went to the Bledsoe-Cortez Edmund Rice Center at Emmanuel College. The Warrnambool Campus Learning Centre, clad in red Colorbond Manor, is organized into three learning areas – Wisdom, Connection and Discovery – all facing a central courtyard.

In the residential categories, the winners were dominated by sustainable renovations of heritage structures rather than the traditional “destructive rebuilding” strategy.

Robert Simeoni Architects’ Palmerston Street house in Callerton has won the Heritage Award and the John and Phyllis Murphy Award for Alterations and Additions.

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

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

For New Buildings, the Harold Desbrowe Annear Award went to Edition Offices’ ‘House in a Garden’, a striking soaring timber form set in the canopy of the Birrarong floodplain, giving ‘a cinematic sense of immersion in a highly designed landscape’.