St Kilda pier wins peak Victorian architecture award

The reimagined St Kilda pier added more accolades to its burgeoning trophy cabinet, taking out some of the top gongs at the 2026 Australian Institute of Architects’ Victorian awards. The $53 million Victorian government project by Jackson Clements Burrows Architects, alongside Site Office Landscape Architecture and AW Maritime, took home the Victorian architecture medal on Friday for the most outstanding project of the year. It also won the Dimity Reed Melbourne prize and the Joseph Reed award for urban design, following its success as a co-winner at the national Urban Design awards in March.

The project weathered controversy in the past, including an aborted attempt by Parks Victoria to introduce pay-per-view access to the pier’s resident penguin colony. On Friday, the Victorian jury panel praised the design for balancing the competing demands of tourists, locals, fishers, ferries, marina users, and penguins, demonstrating how complex infrastructure can become playful, social, and deeply civic. Sustainability, resource efficiency, and community-minded public design took centre stage at the awards, building on recent national and New South Wales iterations. Jury chair Simon Knott stated that this year’s standout projects transcended purely utilitarian briefs to prioritising human interaction, turning prosaic pieces of existing architecture into places of recreation.

Even sites with a grim history faced transformation, such as the former Sunbury Lunatic Asylum built in 1879. Later renamed the Sunbury Hospital for the Insane and the Caloola Training Centre, the location functioned as part of a university campus for two decades before its conversion into the Sunbury community arts and cultural precinct. The project won multiple awards, including the John George Knight award for heritage and the award for interior architecture. Judges praised the design by Architecture Associates with Openwork for its adaptive reuse of an institutional complex previously defined by human containment, successfully balancing a restrictive past with a celebration of community.