You be the judge: Australian architects nominated in 2021 Dezeen awards

Here’s an entertaining if virtual way to pack in a whole lot of vicarious international travel to inspiring destinations: have a squiz at the recently announced shortlist of the 2021 Dezeen Awards, covering private houses, hotels, shops, cultural buildings, offices and more.

Australian architects and designers have always been well represented with world-beating projects and this year, across the increased list of 47 categories in the fourth annual competition, we have 10 short-listings.

If you’re feeling especially patriotic, you can vote now for your local favourite in the Public Vote aspect of the event that is open to all comers until October 11.

Matt Gibson Architecture + Design’s intriguing modification to a North Fitzroy terrace that has living areas separated by a central courtyard and transited overhead with a glass bridge has two listings. It’s in Architecture Urban and Residential Rebirth.

Another Melbourne practice, WOWOWA, is among the five projects competing in Residential Rebirth with their colourful amendments to a modestly scaled 1960s Brighton brick villa called Pony. Its rippling roofline is as bold as the interior colour scheme.

Dezeen is the world’s largest online design and architecture portal, and scoring a long or short-listing – or, better, an overall win in your category – delivers a trophy along with a lot of publicity and reputational leverage.

Listed somewhat perversely in the Architecture Rural sector, given that Nielsen Jenkins’ Mt Coot-tha house is barely on the outskirts of suburban Brisbane, the building that steps up the slip is built of concrete blockwork and corrugated steel to be defendable in a BAL40 bushfire zone.

To those who follow Australia’s various architecture awards, many of our projects would be familiar as on-shore winners. One is Fox Johnston’s Balmain waterside SRG, a lovely expansion of one of a semi-detached pair designed in the 1970s by Stuart Whitelaw. It’s competing in House Interiors.

Also in Interiors, but this time competing as an apartment, is the lesser-known Melbourne project Roseneath Street. In a ’70s commercial building, Studio Goss inserted a cool below-street residence with a mezzanine that’s a combination of the soft and the raw.

Against a field of 16 international entrants but in with a chance in the Sustainable category is CplusC’s well-celebrated and thermally regulated Welcome to the Jungle House with its endless sustainable features, including a solar-panel facade and productive roof planters.

In the larger Housing Project sector is Jackson Clement Burrows’ student housing for La Trobe University. With two arcing wings, 624 student units and some facade aspects reflecting the colours of the plantings across the Melbourne bush campus, it is Australia’s biggest engineered-timber construction to date. It is also mostly empty at present.

Also a highly crafted timber project competing in the Large Retail Interior for Australia is the brilliant Sculptform Studio in Melbourne by Woods Bagot.

In the fun category of Small Retail are the four quietly calibrated rooms of the Armadale (Melbourne) outlet of Camilla and Marc.

There are 234 shortlisted entries and the judging is being done by 75 international judges, including folks like Jasper Conran and Chicago-based Australian Julie Eizenberg.

The people’s choice awards will be announced from October 18-25 but the entrant studios will have to wait until November 22-26 to see if they’ve made the final cut.

While it’s not an Australian project, in view of the long and bitter campaign it took to save Sydney’s famous Brutalist housing commission project Sirius from destruction, it’s worth taking a look at what happened to a new hotel in Antioch, Turkey, when Roman artefacts were discovered on the site.

The compromised build of The Museum Hotel (competing in Hospitality) forced the structure to lift itself well above the historic ruins and relics and to insert modular, prefabricated hotel rooms into a space beneath a protective canopy roof.

This is a 2020 project that looks like a descendant of the 1970 Sirius building that was saved and remade, where the penthouse sold this year for $35 million.