Bathhouse with circular principals wins BDAA awards
The description for the winner of the top award in the 2026 Building Designers Association of Australia National Design Awards is worth sharing, at length, and for some of us at least, guaranteed to go straight to the top of the bucket list.
It’s for a bathhouse designed by Tamara Eyles of Design Artisan and it sits on a former helicopter landing pad on Tamborine Mountain, in Queensland’s Gold Coast hinterland.
“SOL Elements sits within a billabong, surrounded by water and mature bush. From the outside it reads as a perfect circle, but beneath the curved facade the building is set out as a hexadecagon [16 sides], a sacred geometry that organises everything inside it. Private suites and treatment rooms wrap the edge of the plan for seclusion, while the centre opens to a sheltered courtyard of hot and cold onsens.
The whole retreat is designed around the four elements. Water runs through the onsens, the float room and the bathing rituals. Fire comes from a firepit sunk into the billabong and the flame torches that frame the entry. Earth is in the stone, the clay and body scrub station and a grounding lawn, while light, sound and wind are filtered through screened openings, planting and the open courtyard.
The material palette is drawn from Japanese wabi-sabi: yakisugi, the traditional charred timber cladding, vertical timber battens, natural stone and weathered Corten steel screens.
Inside the one compact building are a salt cave, a sensory deprivation float room, a steam room, a sauna, massage and private bathing suites, all designed to fit within a planning limit of less than 200 square metres of use area.
Chris Knierim, CEO of the Building Designers Association of Australia nailed it when he said: “SOL Elements is the kind of building that stops you in your tracks. It takes a tight brief and a challenging site and turns them into something genuinely moving, and it shows the world what Australian building designers are capable of.”
New bid to get rid of lazy spaces
City of Sydney councillor Jess Miller has been challenging what she calls “lazy spaces” for quite some time. Now she’s taking her campaign to council with a motion to endorse a national framework for commercial vacancy penalties and end land banking.
There are about 1 million square metres of underutilised commercial floorspace in the city and “we need to make it work harder”, she said in a recent email statement.
A key target for attention is to flag the issue at a local government conference next year and working on what intervention at state level can shift the outcomesis required, such as taxes on vacant spaces.
“Ideally it can start now, while tax reform is a major topic of discussion, and the demand for space and the opportunities it brings is high,” Miller said.
While negative gearing is putting pressure on prices downwards and disincentivising land banking and property hoarding, the changes don’t apply to commercial property, which means landlords are holding prime commercial real estate empty rather than with tenants.
This was because “it is financially better to leave them vacant in certain circumstances,” she said.
UNSW hub awarded 6 Stars Green Star Building
The UNSW Health Translation Hub has achieved 6 Stars under the Green Building Council of Australia’s Green Star Building ratings. The 35,600 square metre facility was developed by UNSW Sydney and Plenary to become a cornerstone of the Randwick Health and Innovation Precinct to accelerate the transition of research and education into better health outcomes.
Also contributing to the building were Architectus as lead architect, alongside ASPECT Studios and Yerrabingin and Hansen Yuncken as contractor.
The building is fully electric, powered by 100 per cent renewable electricity, including through a 100 kilowatt rooftop solar photovoltaic system, a high-performance facade, as well as rainwater harvesting and a non-potable water network.
The developers said the facade reduces solar radiation by approximately 60 per cent while maintaining natural light and views, while the building itself enables health education, research, clinical practices, industry and community engagement to translate into better health outcomes.
Plenary chief executive Paul Crowe said the building will set a new benchmark for sustainable health and education infrastructure, saying it was a significant milestone both for the hub and the broader industry.
