Paul Andreu
Beijing

Paul Andreu's elliptical National Grand Theatre was a project which seemed ready to join other unbuilt Chinese works by Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito, and other noted architects; but today stands tall near Beijing's Forbidden Palace, having weathered the PR storm.

Gregory Burgess Architects
Strathmore, Victoria

Burgess’ previous projects, despite often being built in modest circumstances, held a kernel of utopian intention. At the turn of the millenium, a commission from the Victorian State Government and an outer-suburban high school gave Burgess and his team the chance to take on that great twentieth century utopia: outer space.

Haskell Architects
Bay of Fires, Tasmania

In a country that thinks of its beaches in images of palm trees, golden sand and deep suntans, Tasmania seems an unlikely location for a beach house. Better known for old-growth forests and a chilly climate, the island state’s coast reveals its own kind of beauty, rugged and exposed. Stripped of the shining gold of its tropical counterparts, the fine white sand of Tasmanian beaches seems to retain a rawness that links it to the rocks from whence it came.

Robert Simeoni Architects
Melbourne

Robert Simeoni’s Park Street House is proof of the adage that the best things come in small packages. At one room wide and three storeys high, the Park Street House was the smallest and least expensive entrant in this year’s RAIA Victoria Awards Residential (Houses) category, yet it still knocked out its larger, more aspirational rivals to take out the overall winner’s position.

Andrew Maynard Architects
Brunswick, Melbourne

On a typical street in inner suburban Melbourne, a double-fronted weatherboard house hides a secret in its backyard: the extension that is Andrew Maynard’s Essex Street House. The deeper-than-average block is typical of the 1890s settlement of the area, when utilitarian workers cottages boasted - for practicality - large backyards for access to a rear laneway.

Larkin Architects
Toronto, Canada

‘God rays’ are among nature’s finest phenomena - we see them when the sun streams down through the clouds after a mid-afternoon storm, or when the ocean shimmers like liquid gold under focused beams of brilliant sunlight.

Paul Morgan Architects
Cape Schanck, Melbourne

Approached through a natural corridor of tea trees, the exterior of the Cape Schanck House is an interplay of glass, stark white and deep brown. The colours and materials seem to point in two directions at once, referencing the clean, pared-back aesthetics of modernism and the back-to-basics images of environmental and rural design

Asymptote Architecture's latest projects - the Penang Global City Centre in Malaysia, the World Business Centre Busan in South Korea, and a luxury residential tower in the United Arab Emirates - are different to their past virtual work. These projects will be built, constructed from real materials in the real world.