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Small, sustainable homes using unloved tiles, imperfect bricks other architects rejected and products from a local Bunnings have won this year’s top architecture prizes for best new houses.
Sydney architect Adam Haddow’s SJB won the highest honour from the Australian Institute of Architects, the 2023 Robin Boyd Award, for his 69-square-metre home in Surry Hills.
At a time when the country faced a once-in-a-generation housing crisis, the institute’s jury of five top architects said there was a dire need for a new approach that moved beyond the four-bedroom standalone home that now averages 229 square metres.
Haddow’s home built on a 30-square-metre scrap of forgotten land “cast off the tired notion of what a city home should look like”.
The facade used broken bricks left over from Phoenix Central Park by Wardle and Durbach Block Jaggers. The bathroom’s marble and tiles were a bargain, Haddow told the Herald, because nobody else liked them.
Trying something new was liberating, the jury said. “We’re left … to create homes that are highly functional, whimsical and utterly full of joy, both inside and out.”
Haddow’s 1.5-bedroom home reflected a trend in the institute’s awards away from larger homes to those that are more sustainable.
More architects were entering smaller projects than in the past, and jurors recognised it was often harder to build small than big.
At the other end of the scale, the renewal and restoration of the Sydney Opera House’s concert hall by ARM Architecture was met with the architectural version of bravissimo by the jury, who said it was nothing short of “awe-inspiring”.
The renewal won two name awards, the highest in each category – The Emil Sodersten Award for Interior Architecture and The Lachlan Macquarie Award for Heritage.
The jury, chaired by the institute’s outgoing national president Shannon Battisson, said the final result was a piece of architecture that the country can be proud to call our own.
“This is truly a space worthy of international recognition,” said the jury.
Other NSW winners include Cranbrook School’s Hordern Oval Precinct Redevelopment by Architectus, which won a national award for educational architecture. Architectus’ partnership with SANAA for the new wing of the Art Gallery of NSW also won a national award for public architecture.
In Victoria, Merricks Farmhouse by Michael Lumby with Nielsen Jenkins, and Spring Creek Farm House by architect Brew Koch, won national awards for residential architecture.
“They’ve used off-the-shelf proprietary kind of products to actually define spaces,” Battisson said of Spring Creek. It used concrete house stumps in standard sizes from Bunnings, off-the-shelf heritage looking black lights and unfinished fibre cement sheet for wall linings. “Any hardware store would have all those things,” she said.
“We need to build well and also need to build smaller,” she said, acknowledging that bigger families needed more space. “If you are a couple then don’t build a four-bedroom house. Just build a really beautiful one or two-bedroom house.”
Another grand experiment, Melbourne’s Nightingale Village – affordable and sustainable apartments designed in different styles by six different architectural practices – provided an example of one way to solve the housing crisis. It won the Frederick Romberg Award for Residential Architecture (Apartments).
Battisson also called for photographs of new homes and architecture to become more realistic.
Battisson said the public had become used to stylised images far removed from how most of us live: “Especially real estate photos where they’ve got a fruit bowl with 1200 orange or lemons.”
“Homes are meant to be lived in, and very few people live in a pristine white box,” she said.
Most photos don’t include people or their mess. That made it hard for people to judge the scale of the rooms, and also made buyers aspire for an unrealistic lifestyle, she said.
“Our homes are sacred spaces, and there’s real joy in the life of a house. Joy in the mess, even though … I really desperately wish my children would occasionally take stuff from the bottom of the stairs.”
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