Two Australian architecture projects have been recognised in the UK’s prestigious Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) international awards for excellence.
The Bundanon Art Museum and bridge and Punchbowl mosque are among the 22 winning projects from 14 countries, recognised for stretching the boundaries of architecture and attaining a standard of excellence.
Both Australian project are now finalists in the RIBA’s biennial grand prize, vying for the title of the world’s most transformative new building. The winner will be announced in November.
Bundanon, the former 1,000-hectare estate of artist Arthur Boyd and his family on the banks of the Shoalhaven River, was gifted to the public in the early 1990s.
In 2022, Melbourne firm Kerstin Thompson Architects completed the Bundanon Art Museum in the grounds to house the extensive collection of art the Boyds had also gifted. Accompanying the museum is an accommodation and creative learning centre called the Bridge.
RIBA judges praised both the subterranean museum and the Bridge, both designed to withstand their flood and bushfire-prone environment, as major architectural works that elegantly integrate the site with the prior heritage buildings.
“The masterplan offers a paradigm shift in the way we think about landscape, from the purely picturesque to an ecological one,” the judges’ statement said.
The project has already been the recipient of two major Australian architecture prizes, the Sulman medal for public architecture and the Sir Zelman Cowen award for public architecture, both in 2022.
Architect Kerstin Thompson said the challenge was shifting the design thinking about climate change from problem to opportunity.
“Fire and flood know no boundaries so here architecture goes with the flow of the region’s natural systems and ecology,” Thompson said in a statement.
“It learns from ways in which traditional owners have over millenia managed these dynamic forces. Feeling climate and its vicissitudes is fundamental to the visitor experience of being ‘en plein air’, to delight in and connect with this remarkable place.”
Punchbowl mosque, completed in 2019, had also previously won the the Sulman medal.
Designed by Sydney architect Angelo Candalepas, the exposed concrete and multi-domed place of Muslim worship in Sydney’s south-west took 17 years to gain approval from Canterbury Bankstown council.
RIBA praised the building as “a profoundly moving sacred space, magically conjured up in the everyday setting of a Sydney residential suburb”. Despite the building’s entirely modern use of material and its formal and spatial manipulation, “Punchbowl mosque nevertheless seems to take its place confidently within the tradition of Muslim architecture”, the judges said.
Speaking to the ABC before the project was completed in 2018, Candalepas admitted that, as a member of the Greek Orthodox faith, he prayed to God for a sign and consulted a priest before accepting the commission.
The Greek Orthodox priest reportedly told Candalepas: “We are all the children of God, and you must do every single one of these projects and they must be the most important projects of your life.”
Candalepas told Guardian Australia on Monday that, within a few weeks of heeding his priest’s advice, he was offered commissions for a Protestant church, a Coptic Orthodox project and a synagogue.
“I’ve been given an opportunity to work in a religious way, which has led me to believe that there really isn’t any difference, when it comes down to the core, between all of us humans – we’re fundamentally spiritual animals,” he said.
“So it is no longer a problem that I thought it was back then. You grow, you become a kind of adult through these processes, where you do become more aware of the importance of all of us living well, peacefully amongst each other, and understanding that actually it’s the similarities, not the differences, that matter.”
