Evelyn Reynolds

Perth Airport has released its masterplan, outlining a multi-billion-dollar investment program into new and upgraded infrastructure. The announcement follows the release of renders in July for a new domestic terminal, specifically designed for Qantas operations, and an expanded international terminal (Terminal 1), both of which are being developed in collaboration with Woods Bagot, Nordic Office of Architecture, and Architectus. The landscape design is being undertaken by UDLA and TCL.
In addition to these works, the masterplan outlines a program to expand Terminal 2, which includes regional connections, a new 3,000-metre runway parallel to the existing one, a 237-room hotel operated by Accor, two multi-storey car parks, and improvements to the road network.

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According to the masterplan, the works will be progressed in stages, beginning with the first car park and the new runway. Construction of the hotel is slated to commence after the initial car park is finished, in mid-2026, while works on the new terminal and second car park are expected to begin in mid-2027.
The entire redevelopment is scheduled to be operational following the completion of the new terminal in 2031, and after Qantas operations are consolidated to the central airport precinct; both Terminal 3 and Terminal 4 buildings are set to be decommissioned.

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Perth Airport CEO Jason Waters said the masterplan details the enormous potential of the airport, which is forecast to grow from an annual passenger intake of 17 million to more than 30 million passengers by 2046.
“We have begun work on the largest private investment in infrastructure in Perth’s history, which will be delivered over the course of this five-year plan,” he said. “This will unlock the full potential of the resources sector and its extraordinary pipeline of new projects worth more than $100 billion. It will create a vast array of new tourism, business and trade opportunities for Western Australia and deliver new property development opportunities on the airport estate.
“Most importantly, it will provide Western Australians with a world-class travel experience within ‘One Airport’ and deliver our airline partners the capacity and efficiencies they need to grow their businesses,” Waters added.

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Waters said that in its development, the airport commits to growth that is responsible and sustainable.
“Sustainability is at the heart of everything we do, and the masterplan confirms our commitment to net zero by 2032.”
The masterplan is now open for public comment until 23 December. More

A development application proposing a residential precinct on a former 168-hectare industrial site in Brisbane’s West End has been lodged.
Designed by Plus Studio with placemaking consultants Urbis, the project would transform a site on Donkin Street through the introduction of five 30-storey towers and one 12-storey tower, with three oriented towards the river and three facing the urban landscape. The development is proposed to accommodate 1,108 dwellings, making it Plus Studio’s largest masterplanned project in Queensland to date.
Each tower is designed to be visually distinct, with the architects noting in a communique that the river-facing towers adopt a lighter colour palette featuring glass balustrades and white aluminium screening, while the urban-facing towers embrace “bolder tones,” with steel powder-coated balustrades in red. The statement noted that podiums have been designed to reference industrial aesthetics through materiality, intended to reflect the site’s industrial history.

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Under the proposal, the riverfront towers are connected at podium level via bridges.
Director of Plus Studio Danny Juric said the practice worked closely with Urbis to design a “public realm that fosters interaction at every level.” Rooftops and podium terraces feature shared amenities, including a terraced amphitheatre, a lap pool, a spa and sauna, a gym, barbecue areas, yoga and pilates studios, and coworking spaces.
The plan also features pocket parks, a pedestrian laneway that connects the riverfront with the city edge, food and beverage establishments and flexible open spaces for markets and community activities.

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The site is framed by established fig trees, some of which, according to the development application, have stood for more than two centuries. These will be retained as part of the precinct.
Juric said the project represents a city-shaping opportunity for Brisbane. “This is a rare chance to transform an underutilised industrial site into a new riverside landmark. We’ve drawn on the character of West End while responding to the lifestyle and landscape qualities that define Brisbane today, creating a destination that connects the city’s past and future.” More

“Material Intelligence” is the theme of this year’s Sydney Craft Week, taking place from 10 to 19 October, marking the ninth year of the Australian Design Centre (ADC)’s popular festival of craft and design.
When ADC director Lisa Cahill first had the idea in 2017, she envisaged a city-wide program embracing all forms of making. It now offers 240 events across Sydney and surrounding regions, from exhibitions and makers markets to hands-on workshops.
“Craft practitioners have a deep understanding of materials, and the skills needed to work with those materials, to source, combine and manipulate them,” Cahill says. “Intelligent use of materials also needs to consider environmental sustainability including the lifecycle of material use. These are also important factors in contemporary building and architecture – Sydney Craft Week aims to spark connections between these different creative communities.”

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Isabelle Toland, co-founder of Sydney-based practice Aileen Sage Architects, will be taking part in a series of digital conversations released during Sydney Craft Week. For Isabelle, material intelligence is a key ethos of her design approach.
“It is a huge consideration in architecture,” she says. “It’s using materials in a very considered and intentional way, really thinking about where they’ve come from, their cultural significance, who’s been involved in making and bringing that material into that particular form.”
It’s also an important element in improving environmental outcomes across the industry, she says. “A greater appreciation for materials is really key to a more sustainable way of looking at building, construction and design.”
Material intelligence has been at the heart of two recent Aileen Sage Architects projects – the Redfern Community Facility completed in 2024, and the Waterloo Community Facility now under development, both on Gadigal Country.

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One striking visual element of the Redfern building (designed in collaboration with First Nations designer Daniele Hromek and Heritage Specialist Architect Jean Rice) is the use of original bricks, previously concealed under render and paint.
“Once you realise how beautiful those bricks are, you’re not going to throw them away,” Toland says. “Especially the clinker bricks, which have those dense spots because of the firing process and material quality, with those imperfections and impurities in the clay bodies.”
These bricks are now exposed around the building’s new lift, along with salvaged dark and pale house bricks from other parts of Sydney. Clay was also salvaged from the lift excavation. “It was quite beautiful with white and red seams,” Toland says. This “wild” clay is now stored at the community centre, with plans for a series of workshops to use it for making.
Toland has worked closely with different First Nations designers and Knowledge Holders on these projects, including how to incorporate culturally significant materials into the design and build. One source of inspiration for the Waterloo building, which includes a childcare centre, is the possum skin cloak. This important material object has been reclaimed by contemporary First Nations women including local master weaver and Gadigal, Dharawal, Yuin, Wiradjuri woman Nadeena Dixon.
Toland learnt a cloak could start with one skin for a child or baby when they were born, which then grew with them, inscribed with their own story. The cloaks also represent a protective layer for children.
“It’s the weight and the density of the pelt, and the texture of the fur,” she says. “It does give you that sense of protection and security, which I think is quite beautiful.”

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The architects integrated culturally significant materials into the building design, including a masonry screen that offers protection while filtering light and views. Toland also joined a weaving workshop led by Dixon, alongside women from the project and the Waterloo-Redfern community. Part of Dixon’s Cultural Weaving Program, the workshop invited participants to wrap fish-shaped frames using a simple stitch. These were later added to a net Dixon had woven with her daughters, creating a shared artwork that celebrates cultural knowledge, community, and connection to Country.
“The weaving project was a way of connecting people through something tangible and immediate, marking the start of a long journey that we were all commencing together to create a new public place for community,” says Toland.
The 2025 Sydney Craft Week Festival runs 10-19 October, with events, exhibitions and hands-on workshops across all forms of contemporary making including ceramics, weaving and leatherwork. More

The state-heritage-listed flat where Australian modernist architect Sir Roy Grounds resided in Toorak has been listed for sale.
Located at 24 Hill Street, the flat is one of five units collectively known as the Hill Street Flats. The front unit, designed by Grounds for his family, is renowned for being a bold geometric experiment. At its centre lies a fully glazed, open-to-the-sky circular courtyard within a perfectly square building footprint, with every room oriented toward this central space.
The flats behind the front unit lack the precise geometric layout of Grounds’s residence, but still feature distinctive elements such as angled car park walls, small slatted balconies and double-height main living spaces.
At the time the Grounds family purchased the Hill Street property, Grounds had completed the Four Flats projects: Clendon, Quamby, Clendon Corner and Moonbria, all located in either Armadale or Toorak and completed between 1940–1941. An original scheme for the Hill Street Flats from 1952 featured a single-storey home for the Grounds family with 12 flats behind it. In 1953, that plan was modified to comprise five flats – a configuration that remains today.

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The same year Grounds revised the scheme, he joined architects Frederick Romberg and Robin Boyd in establishing Grounds Romberg and Boyd, an architectural practice that operated until its dissolution in 1962. The partnership dissolved partly in response to Grounds’s appointment as sole architect for the National Gallery of Victoria – a building that echoed many of the themes found in the Hill Street flat, built a decade earlier. A newly published book by Maria Larkins explores the famed practice in depth, tracing how it operated and how it ultimately all came undone.
In another recent book, Roy Grounds: Experiments in Minimum Living by architect and historian Tony Lee, it’s noted that Roy and his wife Betty Grounds lived in the Hill Street house until his death in 1981. The home continues to be recognised and “celebrated as one of Australia’s most outstanding modernist houses. Grounds’ later projects, both residential and civic, including the Australian Academy of Science (1957) and the National Gallery of Victoria (1959) replicate details from these five flats, confirming his pattern of incremental design,” commented Lee.

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In its statement of significance, the Victorian Heritage Database describes the home as “inward looking” and possessing “an almost eastern character,” expressed through its projecting eaves and the central courtyard, which was originally planted with bamboo. The database further characterised the house as “a striking essay in pure geometry, a hallmark of Ground’s work during the 1950s, and one of the best examples of experimentation with geometry in the work of post war avant-garde architects in Victoria.”
For more stories on the architecture of Roy Grounds, explore the Revisited articles on Moonbria and Boyd Baker House, or read these features chronicling the history of the National Gallery of Victoria, published in honour of its fiftieth anniversary, and the Arts Centre Melbourne, marking 40 years since its completion.

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Expressions of interest for Grounds House are now being accepted. For details, visit here. More

The NGV’s latest design exhibition, Making Good: Redesiging the Everyday on show at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV International, aims to present tangible examples of how designers are reimagining everyday products and systems for the good of both humans and the planet. And it’s a cleverly titled show. The “making good” of the name invokes the positive contribution contemporary designers are making by prioritising ecological responsibility, ethical production processes and social impact. It also hints at what we, as designers, might not always want to talk about: that design, despite its often, good intentions, has been complicit in myriad issues and the cause of significant harm. So, how can we, as designers, begin to repair some of the damage that we’ve caused? How can design make good on its promise to contribute positively to the world?

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The work on display made some suggestions, and I found myself thinking again about British designer Kiki Grammatopoulos’s Rewild the run shoes numerous times after my visit. Learning from biomimicry, the shoes have a chunky, bristled outer sole that grips and distributes seeds, thus involving the runner in rewilding the city. Displayed nearby was the memorably named Full Metal Jacket made from an antibacterial copper textile, created by clothing brand Vollebak. Together, these prototypes prompted the imagination, conjuring visions of cities dense with greenery that had been spread by long-limbed runners, and bacteria-free hospitals teeming with staff outfitted in scrubs that would look perfectly at home in an early 2000s music video.

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Alongside these more evocative works, less glamorous items designed for daily use argued for the transformative impact that practical, functional designs can have. Items eradicating single-use plastic included compostable food wrap, edible coffee cups and plant-based ear plugs, while a dehydrated oat milk powder showed how product innovation can reduce packaging and the energy used in transport, in this case by significantly reducing the product’s weight. Collectively, these items underscored the impact of personal choice on the climate crisis.
Coming from a background in landscape architecture, it would be amiss of me not to mention the built environment work on display, from schemes for more sustainable architecture, to paint systems that purify the air. While the proposal for Hotel Optimismo – an energy-generating, waste-recycling, high-rise built from carbon-sequestering materials by Finding Infinity (presented in a short video) was no doubt thought-provoking, I lingered longer over a film that documented the already built and operating Regenerative Futures Studio at Woodleigh School. Designed by Joost Bakker with McIldowie Partners and Sam Cox, one could see the physical outcome and hear the testimonials of the building’s impact on the students who use it.

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Making Good should make you feel good about design as a profession. And the broad range of approaches on display offers much food for thought when it comes to interdisciplinary thinking. (Are there approaches to more ecologically responsible design that come from fashion design, for instance, that could be taken into architecture? Or vice versa?) Furthermore, as designers, there are the choices we make in our professional practice – how we frame a brief, the approach we take to a project, the materials we specify – but also the decisions we make in the everyday running of our studios, and at home in our domestic spaces. Making Good helps us to appreciate the many scales and dimensions of design, highlighting just how many (design) decisions we make in our personal and professional lives. More

German-Australian studio Laboratory for Visionary Architecture has been appointed to lead the development of a concept masterplan and legacy designs for Expo 2030 Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.
Expo 2030 is a planned World Expo, a large-scale international exhibition showcasing innovation, culture and global collaboration. The winning concept was developed by a consortium including Lava, landscape design consultancy firm Land, major events and expo advisor Christine Losecaat, expo design strategic advisor Samantha Cotterell, Buro Happold, 9 E, Redas, and Montana.
According to a communique from Lava, the Riyadh edition of the expo will be held between King Salman International Airport and Riyadh City, with plans for the site to remain functional after the event as a mixed-use precinct incorporating retail, dining and community facilities.
In a statement, Expo 2030 Riyadh described the event as a celebration of “breakthroughs in science, technology and cultural understanding.” They commented that they were proud to be working with a global team of design specialists led by Lava, and described the concept masterplan as reflecting the spirit of technological and scientific innovation “by interpreting the theme of ‘Foresight’ as a vision for a new way of living for current and future generations.”

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Lava stated the plan incorporates fractal geometries – repeating natural patterns – into the design to improve environmental performance and spatial efficiency. According to the studio, this approach “enhances airflow, light distribution and energy efficiency,” while also enriching the experience of the space for visitors.
Co-founder of Lava Chris Bosse said the design is firmly grounded in nature. “The masterplan exemplifies how nature and technology, environmental restoration and urban innovation can effectively coexist. Expo 2030 Riyadh is a prototype for future cities – linking the microcosm of nature with the global digital realm and creating a new urbanism.
“The design draws from the elegant efficiency and brilliance of nature, using cellular structures as inspiration to shape a futuristic, human-centric city. It enhances walkability and connectivity while ensuring adaptability for a seamless transformation into a global village after the event.” More

A hotel proposal granted planning approval a few months ago at Darwin Convention Centre, situated nearby an Indigenous sacred site, is facing new-found scrutiny from Traditional Owners, after developers were recently granted a new power to proceed construction of the project without further First Nations consultation.
The 11-storey hotel proposal at Stokes Hill, designed by South Australian practice Pact Architects, is part of the broader redevelopment of Darwin’s waterfront.
Developer CEL Australia lodged an application for certification with the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority (AAPA) in August 2024. According to the AAPA, this process involves consultation with Aboriginal custodians to determine “the conditions for carrying out specific works on an area of land or water near sacred sites.” However, earlier this year, NT News reported that Larrakia custodians expressed concerns that the hotel would overlook a sacred site.
At the time of their application, CEL Australia executive director Robert Lee told NT News, “We’ve done as normal and now we’re waiting for certificates to be approved … If they [AAPA] say ‘no’ we would have to consider the reasons why TOs [Traditional Owners] said no … and [if] there are no solutions we will seriously have to consider the future of the project. We do have to respect the locals and we don’t want to upset anybody. We’re not here to make people upset, we’re here to do a project.”
However, former AAPA board member Rachel Perkins recently told ABC News that the developer withdrew this application shortly before the NT government amended sacred sites legislation in May to allow the addition of new parties to an existing authority certificate. This week, AAPA confirmed in a media release that it had revised the site’s existing 2004 authority certificate to recognise both SH Darwin Hotel – the project’s development company – and the Darwin Waterfront Corporation as recorded parties.
Perkins said, “It [the 2004 certificate] was for marina-orientated commercial activities. Now the certificate is being revived for an 11-storey building.”
Chair of the AAPA board Bobby Nunggumajbarr agreed that the certificate is out-of-date.
“The board has very serious concerns about the use of a 20-year-old certificate to progress the SH Darwin Hotel proposed hotel project,” he noted. “The old waterfront certificate does not detail a high-rise hotel next to the Convention Centre or alongside the registered sacred site. Plans for a tower in that location were not part of the original Larrakia consultation.”
According to Nunggumajbarr, “More recent certificates for development around Stokes Hill, including for the Larrakia Cultural Centre, set strict height limits to protect the sacred site. Larrakia custodians have been very clear that the current SH Darwin Hotel design will impact the site.”

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According to ABC News, Treasurer Bill Yan “informed Larrakia stakeholders ‘of the NT government’s next steps to deliver the hotel’ and outlined its intention to use recent changes to the Sacred Sites Act to make that happen” in July. His letter stated that, “Importantly and in line with the new provisions, all recorded parties will be required to fully comply with these conditions under the 2004 certificate.”
However, AAPA’s communique notes that “the NT Government’s recent amendment to the Sacred Sites Act … compels the authority to process such applications without further consultation.”
Nunggumajbarr said, “This application has put the board in a difficult position but under the amended [Sacred Sites] Act we must add the recorded parties.”
The AAPA board will be escalating the matter to the federal government, in doing so expressing their support of Larrakia custodians and their objections to the hotel development.
“Sacred sites and development often coexist and the Darwin Waterfront Precinct is proof of that,” Nunggumajbarr commented. “The precinct demonstrates that with proper consultation and respect, development can proceed in a way that benefits all Territorians, whilst also protecting the cultural heritage of the Larrakia people.” More

In both Māori and Aboriginal cultures, there is a long and ancient history of architecture and building technologies. Before colonisation, buildings and structures weren’t labelled as “Indigenous architecture” – it was just architecture.
In this episode of Design Speaks Weekly, Carroll Go-Sam and Deidre Brown explore what, and who, is defining Indigenous architecture today. Along the way, they reflect on the progress of Indigenous recognition and representation in architecture across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.
Carroll (Dyirbal, Gumbilbara Bama) is a senior lecturer at the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Queensland. Deidre (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu) is a professor of architecture at the University of Auckland and the recipient of the 2023 Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal.
During their conversation, Carroll and Deidre share how Indigeneity in architectural education has changed over time, with each reflecting on how past curriculums offered little exposure to non-Western heritage nor Indigenous typologies.

Design Speaks Weekly is presented in partnership with the Australian Institute of Architects and with support from Lysaght. A fresh episode will be delivered every Tuesday. You can listen to it on major podcast apps, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and Pocket Casts. The full interview can also be read here. More