Books
Australian Institute of Architects
Australian House: The Robin Boyd Award
There are plenty of dodgy award programs in world architecture. Some are venal, many are vacuous – and so are the glossy coffee-table publications they engender. Australian House: The Robin Boyd Award is an exception. The Australian Institute of Architects’ national awards are unusually rigorous, and the Boyd award – recognising the finest new house of the year – is always a career-defining honour for the recipient. Australian House gathers all the winners since the award’s inception in 1981 into a tome with decidedly more heft – both literal and figurative – than your average real-estate lookbook. A faithful documentation of the projects as they appeared in their time, it includes plan drawings, which is important – they’re often left out of more vapid hardback glossies, but the intricacy and ingenuity of a house can frequently be seen in plan and sectional drawings more than photographic views.
It’s quite the greatest hits compilation: from Glenn Murcutt’s canonical Magney House and the ever-delightful Tent House by Gabriel Poole, to Durbach Block’s Droga Apartment perched atop a Surry Hills warehouse and Kerstin Thompson’s wonderful House at Hanging Rock, as well as last year’s winner – the sublime Naples Street House by Edition Office – it’s certainly a register of knockout houses. Every winner tells a story about the state of the art, including the ongoing search for an authentic Australian domestic architectural idiom: with all the earnest jingoism, romantic mythopoesis, and fetishisation of craft that has sometimes entailed.
It’s true this en masse presentation reveals, with rather unsettling clarity, some of the profession’s blind spots and clichés, although, to be fair, this is less a weakness of the book and more of architectural culture itself. For instance, there’s barely a human to be seen in these spare and sunlit interiors, let alone any of the messy detritus of actual domestic life, or the progress of a larger social history. The houses are also, with very few exceptions, the sumptuous dwellings of a highly privileged slice of society – often holiday houses, frequently the architect’s own, overwhelmingly in remote coastal or landscape settings. We see a very particular taste regime laid bare, including the over-representation of a particularly thrusty approach to form – of hard-edged geometric blocks sticking out into the landscape.
Still, if you can squint past the worn tropes and elitism, there’s an awful lot to enjoy here. This is a beautiful book: as revealing as it is important for the story of architecture in Australia.
Thames & Hudson, 408pp, $120
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 28, 2025 as "Australian House: The Robin Boyd Award".
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