At this year\u2019s Venice Architecture Biennale the Australian pavilion\u2019s Home, led by an all-Indigenous creative team, pondered what Country means even when you\u2019re far away \u2013 how to create space for gathering, memory and ritual in a strange land. It was a welcome refuge from the techno-utopian cacophony of the biennale at large, offering a place to be grounded by architecture in ways that didn\u2019t feel possible in any other nation\u2019s pavilion.<\/p>\n
Back home the year brought the usual cluster of beautiful and desirable dwellings across the country: Studio Bright\u2019s Hedge and Arbour House with its rigorous plan and sequence of stately outdoor rooms; the little ripper that is Carlton Cottage by Lovell Burton Architecture; and the sumptuous idiosyncrasy of Casey Brown Architecture\u2019s Babylon, complete with cable car, like a house dreamt up by a magic realist. Anthony St John Parsons\u2019 New Castle is dreamy in a different register \u2013 more surreal, even unsettling, while John Ellway has done it again with Niwa House, another iconoclastic reworking of an existing elevated timber Queenslander.<\/p>\n
Educational buildings have provided some highlights. James Cook University\u2019s Engineering and Innovation Place by Kirk with I4 Architecture and Charles Wright Architects is an airy tropical marvel, while way down south The Shed is Wardle\u2019s latest addition to their suite of post-industrial buildings on the Inveresk campus of the University of Tasmania. Kosloff Architecture\u2019s most recent additions to Pascoe Vale Primary School are as formally elegant as they are narratively rich.<\/p>\n
Other interventions that could improve affordability at the speed and scale we need it have gained traction this year.<\/p>\n
This year saw the first Adelaide Design Week, and the opening of Besley and Spresser\u2019s much anticipated Barangaroo Pier Pavilion made of luminous \u201coyster terrazzo\u201d. DCM completed the Poombeeyt Koontapool Lookout, the last of a series of striking tourism infrastructure projects along the Great Ocean Road, while Searle x Waldron took an industrial workplace in a cemetery and lifted it into something beautiful for the Northern Memorial Park Depot. Lahznimmo Architects continued a streak of cracking public buildings with the Gosford Regional Library, while the regions have also benefited in Coffs Harbour\u2019s Yarrila Place by\u00a0BVN.<\/p>\n
Just now Melburnians are going wild with joy about our new Metro \u2013 stations and tunnels and escalators, oh my. I haven\u2019t seen such elation over public infrastructure since last year at the opening of the equally shiny Sydney Metro. The Melbourne version won\u2019t be as transformative as its northern sibling, but the stations are again sleek and architecturally expressive. From the muscular forked trusses at Town Hall Station to the monumental arched void at Arden Station, there\u2019s bravado and joie de vivre, plus an important public art program. If only every public building had access to the kind of mega-budget commanded by these big infrastructure projects, how different our cities could be.<\/p>\n
Architecture\u2019s peak bodies continue to advocate \u2013 with a mix of plaintiveness and success \u2013 for the role of design in addressing housing crisis. The NSW state government architect this year made a bold intervention with the Housing Pattern Book initiative, selling exemplary housing designs at peppercorn pricing with a streamlined planning approval process.<\/p>\n
The rise of build-to-rent development continues, as does the design aspiration in such projects. Bates Smart\u2019s Indi Sydney tower built above Gadigal metro station is a case in point. Profit-driven solutions won\u2019t solve the problem of housing affordability, but they do hold the promise of producing some robust, high-performance buildings.<\/p>\n
Other interventions that could improve affordability at the speed and scale we need it have gained traction this year \u2013 with prefabrication and other \u201cmodern methods of construction\u201d. These don\u2019t have to be dour exercises in minimising space and amenity, as Blok Three Sisters \u2013 a triplet of townhouses on Stradbroke Island by Blok Modular with Vokes and Peters \u2013 has shown.<\/p>\n
In Victoria, thousands of occupants of public housing towers still wait under the threat of dislocation and demolition while in Sydney, BVN has completed the revised Sirius building, converting it from brutalist public housing into much softened and sanitised \u2013 and expensive \u2013 private apartments. It\u2019s true the building has been saved and the conversion is sympathetic to Tao Gofers\u2019 original design, but what about its social and political ideals? Displaced, just like the public housing tenants who used to call it home.<\/p>\n
\n This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
\n December 20, 2025 as “The year in reviews”.<\/p>\n
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