RAIA National Architecture Awards

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1 Nov 1997

This is an article from the Architecture Australia archives and may use outdated formatting

If there is a theme in this year’s RAIA awards, it is a spirit of creative renewal and repair often overlooked by object-seduced juries in the past. While the Cowen Award for Public Buildings does go to a stirring composition in the round on a Queensland plain, the Boyd Award, as a rare decision, honours “modest” renovations to an already-distinguished house in Sydney. In other categories, winners exhibit aesthetic singularity and strength but also a concern with healing urban wounds, knitting together chaotic localities and enhancing urban places for the psychological satisfaction of observers and users as well as developers. However, the jurors— John Castles, Virginia Kerridge, Peter Parkinson, Ed Haysom and Betty Churcher—have annointed non-contextural interventions such as Country Road’s Melbourne headquarters, given the Commercial Award despite its upstaging of a derelict brick power station, and a recycled timber mansion shunning a street of yawn-boring bungalows at Merimbula, NSW. This year’s surprise: the jury rejected the John Wardle house which won the Victorian Architecture Medal generally given to public buildings. Read on—Ed.