2025 National Prizes: Gold Medal

Jury quotation

The 2025 Gold Medal is awarded to Timothy Hill, director of Companions Hill since 2013, and an architect accountable for quite a few exemplars of Australian structure. His contribution to our career extends to training, skilled lectures and varied types of advocacy that, together, make him a most influential architect whose affect is felt nationwide.

Timothy’s is an mind that mixes rigour with lateral leaps, and an incisive legalistic wit with an exceptional spatial intuition. He challenges, provokes, entertains, and makes use of design to display a deeper appreciation of structure’s position within the Australian constructed setting.

Timothy’s work has been a part of worldwide architectural discourse for the previous 4 a long time. In 1988, he collectively received the sixth Royal Institute of British Architects’ Worldwide Competitors for Structure College students with Antony Moulis. Chosen tasks and publications by Timothy have been exhibited globally, starting earlier than he was even 30 years of age. In 1991, he and Brit Andresen had been chosen alongside 9 different architects to symbolize Australia at that yr’s Venice Biennale, which was his first of 4 biennale exhibition contributions.

Any recognition of Timothy’s work should embody his good partnership with Brian Donovan and their colleagues at Donovan Hill from 1992 to 2012. Earlier than, throughout and after this partnership, collaboration has been very important to Timothy’s work.

Donovan Hill was a most important observe that delivered a few of Australia’s most interesting buildings. For a interval of years, this was a magical affiliation by which the outcome was a lot greater than the sum of the components. These buildings are authentic but in addition grounded in a profound information of the self-discipline of structure, drawing upon precedents for authentic combin-ations and hybrid varieties. They’re about city-making, micro to macro, in beautiful element and in major area. And no matter scale or program, the observe’s works discover the civic alternative of any transient: an overlap with road, city porosity, a cautious sequencing of areas for repose and transition, interconnected by thresholds. At their core is usually a major area for collective gathering, transcending the confines of inside and outdoors.

We expertise this city-making within the Neville Bonner Constructing (1999, Donovan Hill with Davenport Campbell and Powell Dods Thorpe), within the redevelopment of the State Library of Queensland (2007, Donovan Hill with Peddle Thorp Architects), within the Santos Place business precinct (2010, Donovan Hill) and within the Translational Analysis Institute (2013, Wilson Architects and Donovan Hill in affiliation). This championing of the civic can be evident within the home works – the largesse of C Home (1998, Donovan Hill), which is extra civic in scale than home; D Home (2000, Donovan Hill), modest in measurement however open-fronted to the road; Cornwall Flats’ (2007, Donovan Hill) beneficiant engagement; and Daylesford Longhouse (2019, Companions Hill) as a universe of kinds, replete with backyard and pavilions held inside an out of doors room. These buildings have expanded our horizons on methods of residing in Australia and have engendered an expectation that structure can, and should, supply contiguous inside–exterior area by means of which inhabitants can really feel place and local weather – structure that’s sensual, tactile, crafted and joyful.

During the last decade, Timothy has cast a path with Companions Hill, producing a 3rd suite of constructed work that conjures up, questions, and invokes new fashions and paradigms.

Timothy’s work threads by means of partnerships and practices and has earned quite a few accolades, together with twice being awarded the Robin Boyd Award for Residential Structure – Homes (New), and thrice the Frederick Romberg Award for Residential Structure (A number of Housing). In 2019, Companions Hill turned the primary observe to win the Australian Institute of Architects’ highest nationwide awards for each the one and a number of housing classes in a yr – the Robin Boyd Award for Daylesford Longhouse, and the Frederick Romberg Award for Mermaid Multihouse (with Hogg and Lamb).

Alongside a much-awarded portfolio of constructed work, Timothy’s brilliance can be evident in his educating, lecturing and broader dialogue of structure. He was the artistic director of the Australian Institute of Architects’ 2007 Nationwide Convention. His talks and panel appearances are legendary; the viewers walks a tightrope between his phrases of hope, inspiration and, at occasions, damnation – phrases that problem our career and its companions to account for its shortcomings and outright failures. Watching Timothy use his appreciable mind to interrogate constructing procurement and supply is one thing to behold.

Timothy has at all times been the kind of chief who’s keen to sacrifice the convivial to sort out the troublesome. His provocations are sometimes difficult to obtain however at all times extremely productive and intellectually stimulating. The 2025 Gold Medal recognises Timothy’s distinctive mixture of architectural poetics allied to a vital management discourse – a discourse that defines the bigger territory by which architects can function, all of the whereas advocating for structure’s better function and worth.

Jury

Jane Cassidy (Chair) FRAIA – Nationwide President | GHD Design

Kerstin Thompson LFRAIA – Kerstin Thompson Architects

Deo Prasad AO LFRAIA – College of New South Wales

Sue Dugdale RAIA – Susan Dugdale and Associates

Philip Thalis LFRAIA – Hill Thalis Structure and City Tasks