The shortlist reveals for the 27th Australian Timber Design Awards are rolling out now, announced project by project on our Instagram in the lead-up to the October gala. Making the shortlist has always meant something in these awards. This year, it means more than ever.
“The quality of the entrants is so high that even being shortlisted is quite an achievement,” said Kylan Low, who is organising this year’s program. “There are many entrants this year that could have been overall winners in years gone by. It is going to be a very tight race.”
Behind every one of those entries is a team, and that is the point. “Every one of these projects represents so much time, dedication, risk in some cases, and passion on behalf of so many teams,” Low said. “You want to be celebrating every single project. One of the ways we broadcast more projects, as they deserve to be broadcast, is through the shortlisting.”
The reveals are already showing the field’s depth. Among the Public Building finalists is The Forest, delivered by Woods Bagot for the University of Tasmania in Hobart: a campus knitted together through adaptive reuse, mass timber and Australia’s largest commercial application of hempcrete.
Its new-build roof is framed in Tasmanian Oak GLT, exposed through the teaching and study spaces, and some of its timber is on its third life, first fitted out in the Crisp and Gunn warehouse in the early 1900s, repurposed for the Forestry Tasmania Building in the 1990s, and now reused as wall panelling alongside 100-year-old Oregon beams. By retaining 60 per cent of the existing structures on site, the project cut upfront carbon by 40 per cent.
The strength runs across all 13 categories, and not only at the landmark end of the scale. This year has brought the biggest lift in furniture and joinery entries the awards have seen.
“The furniture and joinery category is just wonderful, because you get to see people’s creativity, and features of the wood displayed in ways you just do not see on huge projects involving hundreds of people,” Low said. “You have one craftsman exploring the limits of their timber.”
Every shortlisted team will be revealed on our Instagram in the coming weeks, with the category winners and the successor to the Boot Factory’s Grand Prix announced at the gala dinner on Wednesday 21 October at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art in The Rocks.
