In meanjin, the 2025 Emerging Architect Prize Tour came home — literally! As both the Queensland and national winner, I spoke alone for the first time on the tour to a warm and supportive home crowd and to an online audience via livestream . The talk traced three values and their counterpoints that have been shaping my work and thinking of late: love and limits, beauty and justice, joy and grief. Ideas that are coming up for me are that: relationships are infrastructure, beauty is belonging, and the architect is a translator, not an author. These are working propositions rather than conclusions, and I shared them the same way I have in every city: not to deliver a message, but to see what resonated, what pushed back, and what the profession is sitting with right now. The provocations I left the room with were the ones I keep returning to myself: are we prepared for the moment when the best design decision is to build nothing? Is a building still successful if it is demolished? If belonging produces beauty and not the other way around, what does that mean for the process of creating buildings? How is power showing up in my working relationships, and on whose terms am I working?
Naomi and Yolande, EmAGN QLD Co-Chairs moderating the Q&A
The Q&A was the most demanding of the tour — personal, expansive, and with nowhere to hide! Questions ranged from how to inject joy into daily practice, how to navigate discomfort without being consumed by it, to what I imagined my career would look like as a first-year student (I had no idea — I didn't even know what a section was!). What I noticed, was that the questions kept circling around similar themes: how do we practice ethically, sustainably, and with care — for communities, for colleagues, for ourselves? My answer to many of the questions was some version of the same thing: get involved, build relationships across disciplines, know that trust is built when things go wrong and it is how you repair that matters, and let the feelings move through you rather than block them out. While I didn’t plan a core message, audience members returned to my discussions on the need to sit with discomfort: to resist the urge to immediately smooth over challenge, and instead to stay with it, learn from it, and keep looking ahead to the next step. They also highlighted a deep resonance with the idea that relationships are infrastructure: the networks of trust, care, collaboration and connection that sit behind strong practice and meaningful work or the way a well-intentioned design can fail when architects prioritise imposing solutions over understanding the social realities.
"Architecture is about listening — because when we don't listen, we decide who belongs." - Kali Marnane