Minifie Nixon Architects
Healesville, VIC

Day-to-day work at the new Minifie Nixon-designed Australian Wildlife Health Centre is deadly serious but also entertaining and informative: think somewhere between ER and the National Geographic channel.The AWHC houses a complex range of veterinary services: emergency ward, hospital operating theatres, laboratory, post-mortem zones, care and recovery, rehabilitation, and safe areas for the release of recovered wildlife.

Kinsley + Associates
Cessnock, New South Wales

Kinsley + Associates, led by Roger Kinsley, Managing Director, is uniquely positioned to deliver a coordinated architectural and engineering design solution. The grandstand is essentially constructed of Australian materials, with Luxalon cladding featuring above the colonnade.

Prior & Cheney Architects
Beaconsfield, Victoria

As flocks of young couples and new families flood into Victoria’s Cardinia Shire, the Municipality has been feverishly expanding its facilities to accommodate them and to keep pace with what is now the region’s fastest growing housing development. Indeed, it was not just architectural excellence and innovation that was needed for the new Beaconsfield Community Complex. It was energy.

Lahz Nimmo Architects
Sydney, NSW

Lahz Nimmo’s amenities blocks were essentially designed to do what all toilets do – exist primarily for utility’s sake without intruding aesthetically. The point of distinction here is that this design actually contributes to its surroundings, subtly highlighting the Australian bush-ruralism of the urban parkland.

How to urbanise, industrialise and modernise

As the world lauds Shanghai as a model of exciting urbanism, University of Leeds’ Professor Justin O’Connor has noticed something disturbing. “What,” he asks, “is exciting other than a vicarious reliving of the West’s own innocently brutal days of early industrialisation and modernisation?” Somewhere between dystopic science fiction and this innocently brutal past, Chinese cities hold the West’s gaze with their images of booming growth, teeming masses and environmental apocalypse. But the fact is that nineteenth-century London translates poorly into twenty-first century eco-anxiety and is unimaginable on China’s staggering scale. This is China’s great problem: how to urbanise, industrialise and modernise when the Western model – the only one seriously available – seems to imply Armageddon?

Hames Sharley Architects
Mandurah, WA

Like Anzac Cove, today a sacred site of reflection and contemplation, the award winning Mandurah War Memorial by Hames Sharley both remembers and commemorates the wartime sacrifice of service-men and -women down the years. Located an hour south of Perth on Mandurah’s northern foreshore, the design comprises a procession of columns that emerge from the western estuary on the axis of the rising sun of Anzac Day.

Cox Humphries Moss Architects
Griffith, ACT

When Canberra’s heritagelisted home of cricket and Australia Rules football needed a facelift and a bit of shelter, long-standing architecture firm Cox Humphries Moss was there to answer the call. Cox Humphries Moss specialises in formulating superior designs on a very limited budget, as was the case with Manuka Oval. The plans needed to utilise standard, readily available materials so as to extend the budget to cover the greatest scope of work available.

Ashton Raggatt McDougall
Melbourne, VIC

Melbourne Central was never the city’s main train station, nor was it an architectural masterpiece, or even a successful retail venture. A recent facelift, however, has taken on the challenge of rewriting past shortcomings; rejuvinating the complex much like a Hollywood star reinvents a flagging career with a new ‘image’ and a few well-chosen film and media appearances.

Woodhead International
Shark Bay, WA

Woodhead International’s $7.7 million centre is a collection of simple polished concrete boxes, subtly highlighted with titanium zinc cladding, copper fascia and glass. Nothing too flashy: it’s the landscape and the nature that’s on show here. The rustic, earthy materials speak also of a sturdy endurance in the face of inevitable change. It is due to the relatively untouched nature of Shark Bay’s landscape and ecosystem that the Shark Bay World Heritage Discovery Centre exists at all.

Brewster Hjorth
Mona Vale, New South Wales

This building is not just a library, the centre is also the new home for Pittwater Council- a refurbished and refitted space for the Council Customer Service Centre, Meeting Room, and Offices for Planning and Compliance officers. The Centre was to serve as the heart of the community, a place of interaction and involvement, not isolation.