The St Kilda Pier Redevelopment, designed by Jackson Clements Burrows Architects in collaboration with Site Office and AW Maritime for client Parks Victoria, won the top prize at the 2026 Victorian Architecture Awards on 19 June 2026.

The project had already collected a national accolade earlier in the year, taking out the 2026 Australian Urban Design Awards in March. Its Victorian Architecture Awards win follows a shortlisting announced in April, at which point the firm had three separate projects in contention — a breadth of recognition that positions Jackson Clements Burrows as one of the more active practices in the current Victorian awards cycle.

The design brief, as documented by the Australian Institute of Architects, centred on enhanced recreation, amenity, safety, and accessibility. That framing — public infrastructure reshaped around civic use rather than pure engineering utility — has become a recurring brief in Parks Victoria's asset renewal program, where ageing coastal and riparian structures are increasingly assessed through a liveability lens as much as a structural one.

St Kilda Pier itself carries considerable heritage and cultural weight. One of Melbourne's most recognisable foreshore structures, it sits at the intersection of recreational boating, passive public amenity, and marine ecology — the nearby Little Penguin colony being the most publicly visible of several ecological sensitivities. Integrating AW Maritime's specialist marine engineering expertise into an architect-led team reflects the layered technical constraints the site imposes: wave loading, tidal variation, saltwater corrosion, and the need to maintain operational access for vessel traffic throughout any construction programme.

The inclusion of Site Office alongside Jackson Clements Burrows points to a landscape architecture dimension that is central rather than decorative. Waterfront redevelopments of this scale routinely founder when the transition between built structure and public realm is treated as an afterthought; here the collaboration structure suggests it was resolved at the design development stage.

Two consecutive major awards — national urban design in March, peak state architecture in June — give the project an unusual double-billing that will likely sustain it as a reference point in Australian waterfront infrastructure discussions for some time. Whether that translates into procurement influence, particularly for Parks Victoria's broader coastal asset pipeline, is the more consequential downstream question.