Judging Architecture, Issues Divisions Triumphs. Victorian Architecture Awards 1929 – 2003

Commissioned by the RAIA Victorian Chapter to mark 75 years of the Victorian Architecture Awards, this project presented an opportunity to do something far more ambitious than a conventional commemorative record. Rather than simply documenting the awards as they had been judged, the entire period was reimagined: what if the awards were rejudged from scratch, with today's architects, critics and historians choosing afresh? 

That concept drove both the book's structure and its most distinctive element, a new rephotography survey by leading Australian architectural photographer John Gollings, a long-time collaborator, who returned to the reselected winning buildings to photograph them anew. Alongside the images, a forum in which the rejudging process was examined and debated was documented, giving the publication an analytical depth that went well beyond celebration. 

The book and accompanying exhibition, held at Heide Museum of Modern Art's Heide II gallery from November 2003 to February 2004, were designed to carry the weight of that ambition. Seven decades of Victorian architecture, its evolving standards, its divisions and its triumphs, given a fresh eye and a contemporary design sensibility to match. 

At its heart, the project posed a fundamental question: what does it mean to judge architecture at all? Awards reflect the values and priorities of their moment, and what is celebrated in one era can be overlooked or reassessed in the next. By returning to the record and asking whether the right buildings had been recognised, the book challenged the very notion of award giving, and in doing so said as much about how we see architecture now as it did about the buildings themselves.