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Award-Winning Pier Balances Multiple User NeedsThe reimagined St Kilda pier has added more accolades to its burgeoning trophy cabinet, taking out some of the top gongs at the 2026 Australian Institute of Architects' Victorian awards. The $53m Victorian government project redesigned by Jackson Clements Burrows Architects, alongside Site Office Landscape Architecture and AW Maritime, took home the Victorian architecture medal on Friday, the award given to the most outstanding project of the year.It also won the Dimity Reed Melbourne prize and the Joseph Reed award for urban design. In March, it was the co-winner in the built outcomes category at the national Urban Design awards.Design Success in Balancing Competing InterestsThe project has weathered its share of controversy, including an aborted attempt by Parks Victoria to introduce pay-per-view access to the pier's resident penguin colony. On Friday, the Victorian jury panel praised the project for succeeding in balancing the competing demands of tourists, locals, fishers, ferries, marina users – and even the penguins."The project demonstrates how complex infrastructure can also become playful, social and deeply civic," the judges said.Community-Centric Design Takes Center StageBuilding on recent national and New South Wales awards, sustainability, resource efficiency and community-minded public design took centre stage at the Victorian awards. Jury chair, architect and academic Simon Knott said this year's standout projects were defined by their ability to transcend purely utilitarian briefs and prioritise human interaction."[They] feature beloved landmarks that have transcended their function as a piece of infrastructure," he said in a statement. "We saw multiple community projects that are delightful sites of human congregation where community-centric design has been at the forefront, taking prosaic pieces of existing architecture and making them a place of recreation."Transformation of Historic SitesEven sites with a "grim history" had been "utterly transformed with deft hands," Knott said. One example is the former Sunbury Lunatic Asylum, built in 1879, which has been transformed into the Sunbury community arts and cultural precinct. The project won a clutch of gongs, including the John George Knight award for heritage and the award for interior architecture.The judges praised the design by Architecture Associates with Openwork as an adaptive reuse of an institutional complex that had previously been defined by human containment. "A fine balance is required when a building designed to restrict and remove persons from society becomes one that celebrates community coming together," the judges' statement said.