HUGE CONGRATS TO DURBACH BLOCK JAGGERS
DBJ have won the biggest gong in Australian Architecture, the AIA Gold Medal (2026). Richly deserved for work studded Sydney with moments of surprise, humour and intellectual delight.
Almost 40 years ago, Neil Durbach hit Sydney like a fresh sea breeze – undeniable, authentic and sweetly, utterly surprising. His first building with early collaborator and fellow South African transplant Harry Levine, the competition-winning addition for the Australian Institute of Architects’ NSW Chapter headquarters at Tusculum, Potts Point, was completed in 1988, the same year I blew in from London.
Contemporary but not orthodox, quirky but not post-modern, bold but still somehow demure, it bore the unmistakable stamp of deep architectural intelligence. The same mix of surprise and intellectual delight has characterised all of DBJ’s work since.
Two examples spring to mind. The first is House Holman (2004). Having seen the images, of course – spectacular hero-shots of a curvy white box cantilevered off the edge of the continent – I was prepared to be unimpressed. Glamorous views and eye-catching forms are not the stuff of architecture. Generally, indeed, they’re a substitute. How wrong I was. Even a brief walk-through evinced a design mind of extraordinary subtlety, acuity and compassion, concerned to create not just an impression but a daily experience studded with moments of astonishment and delight
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Five years later, the 2009 Roslyn Street commercial building in Potts Point delivered similarly pleasant surprise. The flatiron site had been home to the beloved Baron’s building, a study in interwar arts-and-crafts bohemia, housing an array of small, locally owned street-front studios and eateries. The proposal to demolish the building produced a huge community uproar and the court’s eventual approval brought genuine heartbreak. When construction was complete, though, many who had complained now conceded that the new building, with its endearing scale and disciplined eccentricity, is perfectly suited to both place and populace. This modest building, though often likened to Gehry’s Dancing House in Prague, offers far more than outsize braggadocio. It shows that the future can be a surprising improvement on even a treasured past – and isn’t that what architecture is about?
