Lacoste + Stevenson Architects
Greystanes Park East, New South Wales

The Recall Storage Facility is designed to contain six million A3 cardboard archive boxes, storage of which depends on the barcode to keep track of their location. So when Lacoste + Stevenson Architects began designing the Recall Storage Facility, the symbolic resonance of barcoding – signifying identification and individualisation, which forms a sound basis for any design principle – was too perfect to overlook

PTW Architects
Millers Point, Sydney

Contemporary urban development in rich historical and cultural spaces in Sydney is a sensitive and potentially nightmarish venture; our spatial and aesthetic connection with heritage precincts is a cardinal manifestation of our unique sense of identity. PTW Architects, with their usual flair, strength and integrity, illustrate with 30 The Bond, at 30-34 Hickson Rd, Millers Point, just how seamlessly such a venture can be achieved.

Architecture’s most prestigious prize finally honours Jean Nouvel for a career of architectural experimentation.

Jean Nouvel, bald and in black, looks like everyone’s idea of an architect. He acts the part too: formulating ideas in bed, vacationing in the South of France, and dressing only in black (except in summer, when he wears only white). Thankfully, his embodiment of architecture’s great clichés is matched by his contribution to architecture’s contemporary vocabulary. Living up to his image, he is widely recognised as one of the most influential living architects, and routinely included amongst a select group of immensely successful superstar architects.

Ashton Raggatt McDougall
Melbourne, VIC

Melbourne Central was never the city’s main train station, nor was it an architectural masterpiece, or even a successful retail venture. A recent facelift, however, has taken on the challenge of rewriting past shortcomings; rejuvinating the complex much like a Hollywood star reinvents a flagging career with a new ‘image’ and a few well-chosen film and media appearances.

I. M. Pei, Studio Pei-Zhu and Atelier Deshaus modernise the Chinese vernacular

Torn across temporal and spatial axes, the challenge for contemporary Chinese architects is to become both genuinely contemporary and genuinely Chinese. The tension between identity and modernity may well be an old cliché, but there is real difficulty in being modern in a world where modernity is identified with Western grandeur or communist squalor, and real conflict in building a “Chinese” architecture without slipping into pastiche or nostalgia.