Sydney’s Campbelltown has paved paradise and put up a parking lot. And the brave jury at the Australian Urban Design awards has declared it heavenly.
The winners of the 2026 awards, announced on Tuesday at Parliament House in Canberra, suggest the era of the star architect’s singular, sculptural spectacle is being traded, at least this year, for something more pragmatic: an unassuming revolution where the most significant breakthroughs are found in natural, open-mesh ventilation, a splash of colour and a heart of soothing greenery.
The Campbelltown station commuter car park designed by Hill Thalis Architecture + Urban Projects, is more than mere infrastructure for cars, the Australian Institute of Architects’ judges concluded. The project, winner of one of three awards in the built outcomes category, is a generous, resilient, and unexpectedly uplifting example of civic design. A little bit of paradise regained.
It’s as if the architects decided that the Campbelltown project was a chance to inject a dose of civic dignity into a structure that, in the usual hierarchy of urban needs, sits somewhere just above a sewage treatment plant.
“This year’s winners reflect a gentler approach to urban transformation,” said Katherine Sundermann, chair of the awards steering committee.
“These projects reinforce a simple idea: urban transformation works best when it involves diverse people, responds to the specifics of place, and improves places over time.”
On Melbourne’s shoreline, another utilitarian project has been elevated above the prosaic.
The St Kilda pier redevelopment – a collaboration between Jackson Clements Burrows Architects, Site Office Landscape Architecture, and AW Maritime – has added a whimsical extension to the Port Philip Bay landmark that began its life as a simple timber jetty in the 1850s and converted into a functional concrete pier in the 1970s.
The ageing infrastructure is replaced with a wider, curved design that balances heavy-duty engineering with the site’s role as a major tourist draw.
The jury praised the project for its “layered embrace” of the bay, noting that technical requirements have been turned into public assets.
A feature wave wall, built to stop the sea breaking over the pier, doubles as a sculptural concrete seat.
It is a rare example, the judges said, of how to balance coastal protection with recreation, and protecting the habitat for a colony of fairy penguins that have called the breakwater home for the past 50 years.
Named for the Woi-wurrung word for butterfly, Balam Balam Place in the heart of Brunswick is a living metaphor for transformation, shedding the cocoon of its colonial past to re-emerge as a vibrant cultural landscape.
The judges praised its “deliberate sense of incompleteness” and its function as a bridge between the deep time of the traditional owners and the formal 19th-century architecture that once sought to define it.
The Victorian-era schoolhouse still anchors the site but the renewal honours the multi-layered history of the inner-city Melbourne suburb.
The Australian Urban Design awards are co-convened by the Planning Institute of Australia, the Australian Institute of Architects and the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects.
The 2026 awards program attracted more than 80 entries spanning four categories – built outcomes, research and advocacy, strategic design and policy, and recognition of the work of individual urban designers and architects.
The New South Wales government was recognised in the strategic design and policy category for its groundbreaking housing pattern book, which the judges said set an ambitious agenda for modest, flexible and affordable urban living while ensuring design quality isn’t sacrificed in the name of streamlined planning pathways to accelerate completion.
It is an “openly democratic” initiative, they said, shaped by local and international designers and accessible to individual landowners, small builders and major developers.
While not a total cure for the housing crisis, the judges conceded, the pattern book is a significant step towards housing communities with dignity as Australian cities transition to denser and more sustainable ways of living.
