Architectus and Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects’ redevelopment of the State Library Victoria has won the architecture category of the Victorian Premier’s Design Awards and a medical machine that creates 3D digital images of the human eye has won the top prize.
Announced during Melbourne Design Week, the premier’s awards aim to celebrate professional and student designers working across a variety of fields.
The redevelopment of the state library has been a years-long process, with the new design was fully opened to the public in December 2019. Reviewing the project in Architecture Australia, Conrad Hamann said it was marked by the architects’ willingness to go with the building’s idiosyncrasies and episodes.
“The work recognizes that large institutional buildings such as this carry inside them their own history and culture, and that refurbishment is as much a weaving, a negotiation, as an outright renewal,” he wrote.
The project is one seven category winners.
The overall winner, which also won the product design category, was designed by Cobalt Design and Cylite to help specialists treat vision impairment. It streamlines the diagnostic process by integrating the functions of five existing instruments into a single, automated platform.
“Cobalt Design and Cylite have shown us that great design can have a meaningful impact on people’s lives and not only spark creative thinking but shape our society for the better,” said Creative Industries minister Danny Pearson.
In the fashion category, HoMie won for the sustainability initiative Reborn, which transforms garments destined for landfill into desirable one-off pieces while raising money for charity.
Sebastian White won in communication design for a series of posters promoting the Isol-Aid Live Music Festival during isolation, and Transpire with Vodafone Foundation won in digital design for DreamLab, a mobile app that uses networked smartphones as a distributed supercomputer to process medical research data on cancer and COVID-19.
In the design strategy category, RMIT University, Public Journal and SBS won for Bundyi Girri for Business, a set of frameworks, skills and techniques that helps non-Indigenous people to “cultivate the self-awareness required to be in active relationships with Indigenous peoples and Country.”
The design firm Today won in the service design category for the Working with Children Checks for Indigenous Applicants program, which “expressed the WWCC framework with sensitivity to the needs, rights and culture of Indigenous Australians.”
Best in the student design category went to RMIT students Charlotte McCombe, Tanuj Kalra and Jui Deepak Apte for Aegis, a bio-constructed hospital PPE made from marine weeds, and to VCE student Hanna Gough for a craft kit that serves as an emergency economic tool and transforms recyclable waste.
This year’s winners were selected from a field of 97 finalists.
