2021 National Prizes: BlueScope Glenn Murcutt Student Prize

Jury citation

The jury awards the 2021 BlueScope Glenn Murcutt Student Prize to Kelly Nortje for her project “Remove – Repair – Reciprocity.” The jury responded to the evocative precision evident at every scale of the project’s conception.

Nortje’s decision to work in a seemingly nondescript place – a residual corridor of industrial and residential fringe, caught between high-speed transport corridors – led to a lyrical investigation of the site’s broader, latent ecology. Through this intellectual and physical framework, Nortje creates the conditions for profound ecological and social change.

The removal of hardstand surfaces encourages the remediation of soils through perennial grass plantings. The adaptive re-use of industrial sheds translates places of resource exploitation into places for generative “making.” A series of flexible workshops, studios and local enterprises is united by central, semi-enclosed garden courts with rammed-earth walls that anchor the insertions beneath their industrial canopy. The project propagates a porous and relaxed civic sensibility – an engagingly “light” conception of Australian public culture.

The jury was inspired by the sensitivity of the approach, the sophisticated resolution of its architectural response, the deft frugality and conceptual richness of the building’s tectonic language and its exquisite expression through architectural drawing.

Jury

Laura Harding RAIA (Chair) – Hill Thalis Architecture and Urban Projects

Alice Hampson FRAIA Hon. AIA – National President, Australian Institute of Architects | Alice Hampson Architect

Leanne Haidar – SONA President, Australian Institute of Architects