St Kilda pier wins peak Victorian architecture award as judges praise playful and ‘deeply civic’ design

The reimagined St Kilda pier has added more accolades to its burgeoning trophy cabinet, taking out some of the top gongs at the 2026 Australian Institute of Architects’ Victorian awards.

The $53m Victorian government project redesigned by Jackson Clements Burrows Architects, alongside Site Office Landscape Architecture and AW Maritime, took home the Victorian architecture medal on Friday, the award given to the most outstanding project of the year.

It also won the Dimity Reed Melbourne prize and t,he Joseph Reed award for urban design. In March, it was the co-winner in the built outcomes category at the national Urban Design awards.

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

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

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Building on recent national and New South Wales awards, sustainability, resource efficiency and community-minded public design took centre stage at the Victorian awards.

Jury chair, architect and academic Simon Knott said this year’s standout projects were defined by their ability to transcend purely utilitarian briefs and prioritise human interaction.

“[They] feature beloved landmarks that have transcended their function as a piece of infrastructure,” he said in a statement. “We saw multiple community projects that are delightful sites of human congregation where community-centric design has been at the forefront, taking prosaic pieces of existing architecture and making them a place of recreation.”

Even sites with a “grim history” had been “utterly transformed with deft 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 Caloola Training Centre in 1985.

After being part of the Victoria University campus for almost two decades, it has now been transformed into the Sunbury community arts and cultural precinct, a project that won a clutch of gongs, including the John George Knight award for heritage and the award for interior architecture.

The judges praised the design by Architecture Associates with Openwork as an adaptive reuse of an institutional complex that had previously been defined by human containment.

“A fine balance is required when a building designed to restrict and remove persons from society becomes one that celebrates community coming together,” the judges’ statement said.

‘To let the building’s story unfold … sometimes directly, sometimes by shadowing the past … is a skill that has many facets. The architects utilise all these skills.”

The push to convert under utilised urban spaces into functional and flexible workspaces was evident in Fieldwork’s design of 65 Dover Street in Cremorne, which claimed the Sir Osborn McCutcheon award for commercial architecture.

Fieldwork was commended for its “elegant and nuanced” response to the site, which includes a rooftop recreation space for workers with a half-size basketball court.

“65 Dover St sets a new benchmark for commercial architecture of this scale – integrous, gracious and refined,” judges said.

The Henry Bastow award for educational architecture went to Baldasso Cortese’s Edmund Rice centre at Emmanuel College. Clad in Colorbond manor red, the Warrnambool campus learning hub is organised into three learning domains – wisdom, communication and discovery – all facing into a central courtyard.

In the residential categories, the winners were dominated by sustainable refits of heritage structures over the traditional “knockdown rebuild” strategy.

Robert Simeoni Architects’ Palmerston Street house in Calrton took out 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 rising construction costs and material shortages.

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

For new builds, the Harold Desbrowe Annear award went to Edition Offices’ “House in a Garden”, a striking, elevated timber form nestled into the canopy of the Birrarung flood plain, giving “a cinematic sense of immersion within a highly choreographed landscape”.