In warrang, the 2025 Emerging Architect Prize Tour continued with Gabrielle Pelletier offering an honest account of her career in architecture. What looks from the outside like an established, well-planned path is, she explained, built on gut instinct, passion, and learning from mistakes. Gabrielle works at Sam Crawford Architects and is unapologetic about the fact that she has always worked for others. In so doing, she is quietly challenging the profession's default definition of success as starting your own practice and leaving a legacy through that. Her work is driven by architecture that tells a story through art and colour, regardless of budget, and by a commitment to advocacy: for herself, for others, and for people she’s never met. Motherhood, she reflected, exposes an assumption that plagues the profession: that we must be available all the time, and that someone else is doing the childcare at home. "What if flexibility was a design principle?" If we can answer this question in our designs, surely we can answer this question in our practices.
Photograph of Potts Point, Sydney by Kali
The Q&A in Sydney was preoccupied with community engagement, possibly sharpened by recent policy changes making engagement a requirement on certain projects, and the resulting rise of tick-and-flick exercises that hollow out its purpose. How do you involve community meaningfully? How do you convince colleagues it matters? Engagement exhaustion, developer assumptions, and the gap between consultation and genuine co-design all surfaced. A thread on agency ran through the discussion: what influence do we actually have when a brief is already written, or wrong? Gabrielle described a return brief and peer review process to challenge clients before work begins. My own answer has been to move upstream into strategy, because we have different spheres of influence, and we underestimate both of them. We have the most direct power with the people right in front of us: our colleagues, our clients, the conversations happening in this room. And we have a broader, slower influence on the profession and society through the ideas and visions we are willing to pitch, and keep pitching. Both matter. Neither is enough alone.
Photograph of Kali and Gabrielle during the Q&A by Ben Marnane
"It takes a village to be a mother and it takes a village to be an architect." — Gabrielle Pelletier, NSW 2025 Emerging Architect Prize Winner
“Maybe architecture isn’t so much about the built outcome, but more about a process.” — Allen Huang, EmAGN NSW Co-chair