Reimagining Birrarung Exhibition Wins 2025 AILA Award of Excellence
Date: Jun 05, 2025
Category: Awards
An exhibition that imagined the future of Melbourne’s Birrarung (Yarra River) has won an Award of Excellence in the Research, Policy and Communications category at the 2025 Victorian Architecture Awards presented by AILA.
Looking fifty years into the future, Reimagining Birrarung: Design Concepts for 2070 presented a series of design provocations for the lands and waters of the Birrarung.
Eight landscape architecture and design studios—ASPECT Studios, Bush Projects, McGregor Coxall, Office, Openwork, Realmstudios, SBLA and TCL—were invited by the NGV to participate.
Congratulations to all of the practices involved for the scale of their imagination and commitment to the project. We’d specifically like to highlight the commitment and forward-thinking perspective of the NGV, whose support and curation brought the exhibition to life outside of the exhibition hall with a sweeping program of activations and events. Our thanks also go to the Birrarung Council and Wurundjeri elders who supported and took part in the project—this was a real community effort.
Eight landscape architecture and design studios—ASPECT Studios, Bush Projects, McGregor Coxall, Office, Openwork, Realmstudios, SBLA and TCL—were invited by the NGV to participate.
Congratulations to all of the practices involved for the scale of their imagination and commitment to the project. We’d specifically like to highlight the commitment and forward-thinking perspective of the NGV, whose support and curation brought the exhibition to life outside of the exhibition hall with a sweeping program of activations and events. Our thanks also go to the Birrarung Council and Wurundjeri elders who supported and took part in the project—this was a real community effort.
ASPECT’s contribution comprised a proposition for repairing and repurposing the river in six acts, with the overall goal of making use of the the river’s parklands as large-scale shared spaces for a denser, more populous city in 2070.
Among the proposed acts are the partial or complete removal of the South Eastern Freeway, a new north-south connective parkland, and the reconstruction of lost wetlands and billabongs.
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