Australian Institute of Architects’ National Prizes 2020

Gold Medal

John Wardle

John Wardle is an architect’s architect. He is a designer of consummate skill whose works – from small, intricate pieces of joinery to complex highrise buildings – receive detailed attention and conscientious formal experiment. His works celebrate both individual craft and the broader production processes of making a building and re-position the role of the architect as chief designer in that activity. Importantly, his works are the outcome of a studio-based collaborative practice.

Since the formation of his Melbourne-based practice in 1986, John Wardle has devoted his energies to maintaining the design ethos of the small office as it took on ever larger institutional and commercial projects across the country. His early practice was built on the design of single-family houses such as Kitamura House in Kew, Victoria (1996) and Balnarring Beach House on the Mornington Peninsula (1997), whose external forms, interiors and joinery rejoiced in the pleasures of creating place, spatial delight and exquisitely resolved detail. At the same time, Wardle commenced a long and productive association with institutional clients CSIRO and the Salvation Army, designing, on the one hand, laboratories and research facilities and, on the other, low-budget low-income residential accommodation. As a result, Wardle and his office developed expertise in responding to programs and client bodies of considerable complexity, while at the same time delivering projects of significant architectural design integrity.

More than three decades of honing skills to address often competing agendas purposefully, cogently and with the ongoing support and development of a studio-based office of committed staff at every level has meant that Wardle has created a practice of national stature and international repute: a practice in which design excellence takes the prime position in every single project and at every scale.

In the last decade, John Wardle Architects’ institutional and commercial buildings have reasserted architectural form at the city scale. The Urban Workshop (2007, in joint venture with Hassell and NH Architecture) and the Nigel Peck Centre for Learning and Leadership (2007) in Melbourne, the Kaurna Building (2005, in joint venture