Victoria’s bio-regional materials are full of potential. Why do so few reach a building site?

Associate Directors Tim Brooks and Bettina Robinson have been awarded the 2025 Alastair Swayn International Research Grant.

The grant is run by the Alastair Swayn Foundation and assessed competitively by an independent panel, supporting research that brings new knowledge and connections back to Australian architecture and design.

Tim and Bettina‘s proposal – Built from Here: Connecting Regional Resources to Low-Carbon Building Practice – is about mapping Victoria’s regional materials and manufacturing capacity. The project draws on international models to produce supply chain maps, material audits, and practical frameworks that can be used by Victorian practitioners working with local, low-carbon resources.

The research will trace the full chain that sits behind a building product: raw supply, aggregation, processing infrastructure, manufacturing systems, and the compliance pathways that decide whether a material reaches a site. Plenty of low-carbon and regenerative materials exist. Far fewer make it into projects as usable, compliant products.

Built from Here is about investigating where that chain breaks, and what it would take to close the gap locally in Victoria. The work is just getting underway. We’ll share more as the research develops.

The Alastair Swayn Foundation funds research that contributes to Australian architecture and design culture.

Adaptive reuse in focus at Melbourne Design Week

What do we do with the buildings we already have? Associate Director Tim Brooks took part in two events as part of Melbourne Design Week, tackling this exact question.

A frank panel on adaptive reuse

Tim joined the Melbourne launch of Adapt! Designing New Lives for Old Buildings, a sold-out evening discussing how to give old buildings a second life. He shared the panel with the book’s authors Hannah Lewi and Cameron Logan, alongside Kerstin Thompson, Robert Crawford and Suzanne Zahra, and Prof. Rory Hyde moderating.

Our cities hold an enormous amount of carbon in their existing fabric, so keeping that fabric is now a sustainability question as much as a heritage one. The panel didn’t avoid the hard parts – the cost, the compromises, the technical headaches – but it made a clear case for reuse over demolition.

Adapt! Designing New Lives for Old Buildings is available now, online and in store.

A walking tour through Collingwood

The second event was a walking tour with EmAGN, the Australian Institute of Architects’ Emerging Architects and Graduates Network. The route moved through Collingwood and a set of adaptive reuse and cultural projects, then finished with a panel discussion. Tim was among those presenting along the way and contributed to the conversation.

Collingwood Yards was the final destination, rounding out the tour, and a useful example of what reuse can give back to a neighbourhood.

Our thanks to EmAGN Vic and Uro Publications, and the NGV as the initiator of design week.

395 Albert Street a finalist in three categories at the 2026 Urban Developer Awards

LIV Albert is a finalist in three categories at this year’s The Urban Developer Awards for Industry Excellence – our project with Mirvac.

395 Albert Street – a build-to-rent multi-residential project with Mirvac – is shortlisted in not one, but three categories this year. Including for Excellence in Sustainability, Build-to-Rent and PBSA, and High-Density Residential (200+ Homes).

The overarching idea for this project was about being a good neighbour and creating strong links to the surrounding parks and green spaces.

Our thanks to Mirvac and everyone who worked on LIV Albert.

See all the shortlisted projects from this year’s Urban Developer Awards.

What could housing look like at the urban fringe? Sub-topia is calling for your ideas

We’re proud to be a sponsor of Sub-topia: A clustered vision for living at the urban fringe, a new Ideas Competition for students and early-career practitioners that asks how greenfield development in Victoria could be done differently.

Convened by the Urban Design Forum with the Robin Boyd Foundation, Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) Victoria, VicHealth, Council Alliance for a Sustainable Built Environment (CASBE), National Growth Areas Alliance (NGAA) and The Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV), the competition centres on a regional town-edge site west of Melbourne, on Wadawurrung Country. The brief invites multidisciplinary teams to propose neighbourhood-scale alternatives to the default subdivision model – designs that support ecological repair, health and wellbeing, and community life at the urban fringe.

The initiative asks questions like: What does housing look like when Country is treated as a design driver, not a constraint? How do you build diversity of typology into a greenfield site from the outset? What changes when the unit of design is a cluster, a neighbourhood, a piece of landscape – rather than a single lot?

These are the kinds of questions we engage with across our own work, in housing, masterplanning and advisory. Sponsoring Sub-topia is a way of putting the same thinking into the hands of the next generation of practitioners and seeing where they take it.

With a prize pool of $15,000, the competition launches on Sunday 24 May at Robin Boyd’s Walsh Street house as part of Melbourne Design Week.

Registrations close 8 June, and submissions are due 12 July 2026.

Full details and updates via the Robin Boyd Foundation.

65 Dover Street shortlisted in the 2026 Victorian Architecture Awards

65 Dover Street, Cremorne, has been shortlisted in the Commercial Architecture category of the 2026 Victorian Architecture Awards, announced by the Australian Institute of Architects’ Victorian Chapter.

FLDWRK_DOVER_235_WEB — The rooftop features a half basketball court and a demountable marquee that can be used for events during inclement weather.

Cremorne is a suburb mid-transition – a light-industrial past giving way to its emerging life as an innovation precinct – and that tension shaped our design for 65 Dover Street. Carved along its 65-metre street frontage, the brown brick podium reads as three scallops, breaking a single large floorplate back down to the fine-grain rhythm of the streets around it. The same curves carry up through the glass tower above, drawing daylight to the back of the floorplate and turning what would otherwise be a tight footpath edge into a civic forecourt. The design move allows room for landscaping, bikes, pedestrians and outdoor seating for two hospitality tenancies.

Inside, the planning is built around a worker’s day rather than a single arrival point. Each route in – on foot, by bike, by car – has its own choreographed sequence, with end-of-trip facilities including a sauna, a fully recycled-water carwash and a podcast studio. The rooftop is treated as a series of outdoor rooms: a half basketball court, yoga and Pilates space, varied seating with power and data, and a demountable pavilion that turns the court into a weather-protected events space.

The Commercial Architecture category includes nine shortlisted projects this year, with adaptive reuse featuring strongly across the broader 2026 program. State winners will be announced at the Victorian Architecture Awards on 19 June, with national entries to follow in November.

Thanks to the jury, the project team and to our client Fortis and collaborators.

A metre or two: 38 Albermarle St, Kensington featured in Never Too Small

Our 38 Albermarle Street project in Kensington is featured in Never Too Small magazine, in a feature story on apartment design – The Meaning of a Metre.

The piece unpacks how small measurements – a metre here, a few centimetres there – shape the way people live in apartments and move through cities. Drawing on Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, the article includes a conversation with Rob Adams AM, alongside our director Quino Holland.

For 38 Albermarle, developed with Assemble, we replaced the typical double-loaded corridor with an open-air walkway that cuts through the building. The shift does two things at once: it brings cross-ventilation and daylight to every apartment, and it makes room for the kind of incidental contact that builds neighbourliness. Built-in bench seating, vertical lightwells, and a metre or two of private verandah at each front door give residents somewhere to pause, plant something, or stop and talk.

They’re small gestures, but ones we’re always adding to. As Quino puts it in the article, “I think the most important tool an architect can deploy is empathy. It’s about making sure that we’re not narrowing down people’s possibilities when they move into an apartment, but actually broadening them.”

Good apartment design isn’t necessarily about adding more – it’s about giving people the space to live fully, at any age and stage. As Quino notes, designed well, an apartment can hold a growing family, pets, friends and a life that changes over time.

You can read The Meaning of a Metre on the Never Too Small website, or pick up a copy of the magazine via the Never Too Small online store.

395 Albert Street a finalist in the Dulux Colour Awards

LIV Albert is a finalist in the Commercial and Multi-Residential Exterior category at the 2026 Dulux Colour Awards.

LIV Albert (395 Albert Street) is a build-to-rent development by Mirvac, surrounded on all sides by parkland.

The project’s design draws on Brunswick’s DNA – the Victorian-era red brick and post-war cream that define the local vernacular. Tones darken at the base to ground the buildings, lightening through the mid-levels to silver metal cladding at the top.
This year marks the awards’ 40th, with 94 finalists drawn from more than 540 entries across Australia and New Zealand.

The exterior category of the Dulux Colour Awards looks at how colour performs on the outside of a building – at the scale of the street, in changing light, over time.
Our thanks to Mirvac and everyone who worked on LIV Albert.

Read more about 395 Albert Street, Brunswick.

Flowe Bowden featured in ArchitectureAU

Our Flowe Bowden project was featured in ArchitectureAU – a mixed-use development in Bowden, on the north-western edge of the Adelaide CBD.

Designed for South Australian developer Otello, the 10-storey mass timber building will deliver more than 100 one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, hospitality spaces, and a multi-level health and wellness centre with pilates, hot and cold pools, saunas and physical therapy facilities. The site sits opposite the award-winning Plant 4 Bowden market hall and frames the Bowden Village Reserve, with activated frontages on all three sides.

Rather than treating wellness as a ground-floor amenity, the design integrates it through the building’s full section — with generous breezeway corridors, cross-ventilated apartments with light on two sides, and full-width balconies. The expressed mass timber structure carries through from exterior to interior, with the timber shell contributing to both the building’s environmental performance and its spatial character.

Twenty percent of the yield is allocated to affordable housing through Home Seeker SA, exceeding the 15 percent planning requirement. Sixteen apartments will provide specialist disability accommodation. The project is targeting a 5-Star Green Star rating.

Construction is expected to begin mid-2026.

Read the full article at ArchitectureAU.