Northside brewery precinct takes out top Brisbane architecture award

The celebratory beers will flow after Craft’d Grounds at Albion, with its anchor brewery, took out Brisbane’s top architecture award.

The precinct in Brisbane’s inner-north took out the Building of the Year Award for its conversion of an old warehouse into a vibrant foodie and lifestyle locality at the Australian Institute of Architects regional awards held in Fortitude Valley on Friday night.

Craft’d Grounds at Albion has been named Brisbane’s Building of the Year. Credit: Chris Wardle

Along with the night’s other winners, it will progress to next month’s state finals.

The institute’s jury said the Conrad Gargett-designed project had helped transform what was a light industrial inner-city suburb.

“This project is a standout example of adaptive reuse; the building’s original use is reimagined whilst a sense of its past identity is maintained by elevating the structure’s existing saw-tooth roof form,” the jury found.

“The robust design is evidenced by the building’s diverse occupancy, demonstrating the commercial success of the project.”

Come 2032, it will be adjacent to the Breakfast Creek Olympic precinct.

Conrad Gargett architect John Flynn, who was project lead for the firm, said it was important to his client, James Rennell, to preserve the building’s bones when developing his vision.

“Compared to doing a normal suburban retail box, this was a great project,” Flynn said, before he knew the award was won.

“Keeping it simple is pretty tricky sometimes, but James didn’t want to knock it down and build something else.

“So they kept the old structure and when people see what’s happened to it, it certainly was the right move to preserve what we had and reinvigorate it.”

Also making the winners’ list was Heritage Lanes, the new headquarters of Suncorp at 80 Ann Street in Brisbane’s CBD, and the redevelopment of Fortitude Valley’s Jubilee Hotel.

The Woods Bagot-designed Heritage Lanes was awarded the 2023 Lord Mayor’s Brisbane Buildings that Breathe architecture prize.

Once the site of the Brisbane Fruit Market, the 35-storey Heritage Lanes incorporated heritage buildings, provided a pedestrian thoroughfare between Ann and Turbot streets and accommodated 7000 workers.

“The double volume of the entry plaza visually connects indoors to outdoors and creates a hybrid subtropical experience,” the jury said.

“A combination of the warm material palette, food and coffee retail outlets, subtropical landscaping, seating areas, and dramatic high-tech artwork form a welcome public plaza that surprisingly reconnects two streets in the heart of the city.”

The People’s Choice Award went to Jubilee Place, the $200 million-plus development that towers over its heritage-listed eponymous hotel.

Blight Rayner Architecture designed the landmark Fortitude Valley development, which also took out an AIA jury’s commendation for urban design.

“With only four interior columns, the architect’s thorough command of the diagrid structural system delivers an open floor plan that offers flexibility to potential tenants,” the jury said.

“The building maximises the commercial yield on a site that would have otherwise been considered unbuildable.

“Command of the structure has allowed the architects to create a dynamic cantilevered form so that the building proportionally celebrates the historic Jubilee Hotel.”

Refresh Studio for Architecture picked up the Greater Brisbane House of the Year Award for Habitat on Juers, a 16-unit social housing project in the Logan suburb of Kingston.

“Through clever design, the Habitat on Juers project breaks down typical institutional forms associated with social housing,” the jury said.

In addition to the major awards winners, 48 projects in the Greater Brisbane region received jury commendations from the AIA.