2019 National Architecture Awards: National Award for Urban Design

Jury citation

The Parliament of Victoria Members’ Annexe is an ambitious yet restrained contribution to Melbourne’s parliamentary precinct. It gives clarity and coherence to an assemblage of government buildings that, over many years, had devolved into a rabbit warren of additions, subdivisions and haphazard enclosures. What has been accomplished is not only of high architectural merit; it is transformative to the practice of government for the state of Victoria.

In contrast to the previous cramped and inadequate spaces, all new parliamentary offices have natural light and external views. Where inequitable space and amenity reinforced hierarchy and temporal political power, all members of parliament now enjoy equal facilities.

The design is as much a piece of landscape as it is a building. It is a “building-scape,” where a new cloister courtyard, sunken and yet full of light and vegetation, makes every office a special one; where corridors provide opportunities for informal meetings and consultation as much as they enable circulation and movement. The act of recessing the building into the grounds of the parliamentary precinct reduces its outward visibility but heightens its social relevance to the mechanics of government. This is a humble project with powerful urban consequences.

Parliament of Victoria Members’ Annexe is located in Melbourne, Victoria and is built on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation.

For more coverage, see Dimity Reed’s review from Architecture Australia Mar/Apr 2019.