Last Friday, the Australian Institute of Architects revealed the winners of the 2025 Victorian Architecture Awards, celebrating excellence in architecture across Melbourne and regional Victoria. Recognised as Australia’s largest state-based architecture awards program, this year’s event honoured projects that exemplify innovation, sustainability, and community impact. So, let’s take a look at the revered projects that took home a win.
Among the top accolades, Searle x Waldron Architecture received the prestigious Victorian Architecture Medal for its transformative Northern Memorial Park Depot – a light-filled timber workplace that also earned the Melbourne Prize, an Architecture Award for Commercial Architecture and a Commendation in Sustainable Architecture. Kennedy Nolan’s richly layered Melbourne Place also emerged as a major winner, receiving multiple awards across Commercial and Interior Architecture categories.
The Jury noted: “The project transforms the traditional depot into a light-filled, emotionally intelligent workplace that fosters wellbeing, connection, and dignity. Principles of care and repair are woven through every detail – from the mass timber structure and naturally ventilated workspaces to the robust, locally sourced materials that root the building to its site.”
2025 Named Award Winners:
Victorian Medal
Winner: The Northern Memorial Park depot by Searle X Waldron Architects
The jury noted: “In a field of exceptional contenders, it stood apart for its generosity of spirit, sophisticated environmental response, and capacity to uplift both place and people.”
Dimity Reed Melbourne Prize
Winner: The Northern Memorial Park depot by Searle X Waldron Architects
The jury noted: “This building signals hope and opportunity, demonstrating the critical role that architecture can play in challenging convention and implementing change.”
Regional Prize
Winner: The Munarra Centre for Regional Excellence by ARM Architecture
The jury noted: “The building transcends its role as a school and creates generous public spaces with a circular gold courtyard at its centre and a deep arched loggia at its perimeter.”
Commercial Architecture
Winner: Melbourne Place by Kennedy Nolan
The jury noted: “The architect’s early conception of “an abstract zoomorphic form” is strongly evident as both emblem and guiding rule translated into every detail of a sequence of remarkable Melbourne interiors. With an orchestration that includes many local makers and artists Melbourne Place draws from and adds to the theatricality of the city’s social life.”
Educational Architecture
Winner: Pascoe Vale Primary School by Kosloff Architecture
The jury noted: “The outcome is a striking yet unified school campus that instils calm pride in its community. The building responds cleverly to its context, pushing hard against noisy roads, and pulling back to wrap around ageing peppercorn trees and sensitive spaces. Brick is the hero across all three stages, with the new buildings engaging in a playful dialogue with the original heritage building.”
Heritage Architecture
Winner: The Central Goldfields Art Gallery by Nervegna Reed Architecture
The jury noted: “Value for Money doesn’t do the outcome justice. Functional demands have been exceeded with the new spaces light, connected and coherent. The original building is clearly legible and celebrated.”
Interior Architecture
Winner: Melbourne Place by Kennedy Nolan
The jury noted: “Melbourne Place is both sophisticated and irreverent, an interior of depth, delight and cultural specificity. A deserving recipient of the Marion Mahony Award for Interior Architecture.”
Public Architecture
Winner: Eva and Marc Besen Centre by Kerstin Thompson Architects
The jury noted: “This exemplary project redefines the role of a regional cultural facility, elegantly uniting public engagement, education and art conservation within a singular architectural expression.”
Residential Architecture – Multiple House
Winner: Nightingale Preston, Breathe Architecture
The jury noted: “Nightingale Preston sets an elevated benchmark for apartment living, prioritising the fundamentals while establishing a lively neighbourhood – both within and to its surrounds.”
Residential Architecture – Houses (Alterations and Additions)
Winner: Dunstan, SSdH
The jury noted: “SSdH’s granular response to context and the practicalities of their clients’ brief has been delivered with playful ingenuity- but in a broader sense, Dunstan is an exemplar of how our suburban buildings can be sensitively revitalised to create meaningful housing.”
Residential Architecture – Houses (New)
Winner: Hedge and Arbour House, Studio Bright
The jury noted: “This project offers a replicable, forward-thinking model for how suburban housing might evolve – one where built form and environment are not at odds, but are integrated with sensitivity, restraint and innovation.”
Small Project Architecture
Winner: Grace Darling Hotel Parklet, by Kerry Kounnapis Architecture Practice
The jury noted: “The project has its own personality, independent of the bar venue, successfully speaking to this city’s public furniture, toilets and kiosks, through its use of colour and form made from well-detailed steel elements.”
Urban Design
Winner: Glenn Huntly Train Station, Glen Huntly Station by COX Architecture with Rush Wright Associates
The jury noted: “Leveraging their expertise in station design, Cox tested multiple station configurations, driving an outcome that prioritises solar access, a generous public realm, exceptional amenity and a strong sense of this place.”
Sustainable Architecture
Winner: The Paddock by Crosby Architects
The jury noted: “The jury was impressed by the project’s restorative impact on the site, its support for sustainable living and the architects’ holistic commitment to a harmony of architecture, community and place. The Paddock offers an inspiring model for regenerative residential design.”
EmAGN Award:
Winner: Dunstan by SSdH
The jury noted: “A discernible sense of expressed elemental composition pervades while a series of courtyards populate the interior with garden views and extensive daylighting. Each finish, each material, each junction of ‘Dunstan’ has been considered for its contribution to the spatial journey and the experiential whole.”
COLORBOND Award for Steel Architecture
Winner: Casuarina Pavilion by Greenaway Architects
The jury noted: “An exemplar project to the power to which steel architecture can simultaneously blend effortlessly into its context and yet stand out with striking presence to achieve a refined harmony between the built form and the surrounding natural environment.”
About the Australian Institute of Architects – Victorian Chapter Awards
The Victorian Architecture Awards enables public and peer recognition of the innovative work of the Institute’s members and promotes architects and architecture across Victoria and Australia.
About the Australian Institute of Architects
The Australian Institute of Architects is the peak body for the architectural profession, representing over 11,500 members across Australia and overseas. The Institute actively works to improve the quality of our built environment by promoting quality, responsible and sustainable design.
photography by Rory Gardiner.
photography by Rory Gardiner.
photography by Rory Gardiner.
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