John Wardle Architects is internationally renowned for making extraordinary buildings and places that matter. Our team of 100 design professionals work across Australia and internationally from our two studios in Melbourne and Sydney.

Our practice is a large collaborative environment where every project has a range of creative, technical and strategic contributions from a diverse team of architects and interior designers within JWA. We retain the creative energy of a small studio, pinning work up, and exploring new territory. The conversations we have with our clients are often the seedbed for new ideas and directions. We are inclusive, always curious to understand another's point of view.

We have expertise in master planning, urban design, architecture, and interior design. Led by Founding Partner, John Wardle, our work ranges across education, residential and commercial projects, encouraging the cross fertilisation of ideas.

JWA is owned by 13 Australian shareholders who are all current employees or nominees of current employees. Our practice ownership model provides our team members with the opportunity for growth and the potential of becoming a shareholder. It creates a diverse and robust ownership structure.

Major shareholders are John Wardle, Stefan Mee and Meaghan Dwyer. Minor shareholders are Mathew van Kooy, James Loder, Richard Sucksmith, Diego Bekinschtein, Minnie Cade, Yee Jien, Kah-Fai Lee, Jasmin Williamson, Luke Jarvis & Amanda Moore.

Many projects by JWA have been highly awarded. In 2018, this included National AIA Awards for Educational Architecture and Interior Architecture, the RIBA Award for International Excellence and the Dezeen Award for Best House Interior. JWA has twice been recognised with the prestigious Sir Zelman Cowen Award for best public building in Australia in 2002 and 2006. We have twice received Robin Boyd Awards for best residential project in Australia. In 2020 JWA won the New South Wales Architecture Medallion for Phoenix Central Park which was completed with Durbach Block Jaggers. Our practice has also won two Victorian Architecture Medals.

Awards

Like any good conversation, our design process requires us to be both good listeners and excellent advocates. We ask the right questions and provide thoughtful, and thought provoking answers. We like to imagine that this conversation continues, after we finish our work, between the building and its occupants. Perhaps, they may say to a friend: “This building likes me”.

In 2022 our first Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) – REFLECT was formally endorsed by Reconciliation Australia. Our RAP began as an exploration into what ‘best practice’ First Nations engagement looks like in project work and has expanded into a much broader knowledge and interrogation of Australia’s history and what is it to be Australian. This process has prompted within our practice a desire to learn more about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, community, cultural values and beliefs. The initiatives outlined in our RAP provide an excellent foundation for us as a practice to explore new ways of thinking and be more inclusive in the way we work and design.

We acknowledge and pay our respects to the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we work and build our projects.

Observation

There is a fundamental axis for founding Principal John Wardle, and our practice as a whole, between immersive work and reflective retreat, between our Collingwood studio and Bruny Island farm. These two places are very different. Collingwood is inner urban Melbourne, historically occupied by slum housing, small factories, distilleries and breweries. Bruny Island is pastoral landscape, connected to Tasmania’s history of whaling and farming, and also to aboriginal history prior to colonial settlement.

Our practice regularly spends time with local tradespeople on Bruny Island making small installations on the farm – a creek bridge, a stile to clamber over fences, a fire pit for the cold evenings, a bird watching platform – and planting trees as part of a reforestation program. As well as learning some practical skills (perhaps quickly forgotten), the real value is in immersing oneself in a place, which improves our powers of observation.

Place

Our architectural ideas emerge from an understanding of place, through history, topography, context and culture. We see our work as being vitally connected to its surroundings and to the people who inhabit it. We often describe our projects as ‘explanatory buildings’ that reveal or frame an aspect of their inner workings, their cultural purpose or their relationship to the world.

In conversation, we talk about ‘scalelessness’, an invented word, and how architecture must work at many scales – from the landscape to the hand, from the city to an individual window – and in so doing reveal something about us and our surroundings. As a practice it means that we like to work both strategically and tactically, both conceptually and in detail.

We search for a combination of project and context (physical, historical and cultural) that elaborates upon a heightened sense of place.

Making

We are fascinated by the nature and quality of a material, its colour and grain, the way that it is cut and fits together. The care shown in how materials are employed tells a story about the value that a community places in its built environment. It can also intertwine with a client’s aspirations, a city’s culture and traditions, a society’s preoccupations, the history of a place and new technology.

The detail of systems and materials, at the scale of a person, is highly considered by our practice. These are the moments of one-on-one interaction with a building, where you may touch a handrail, open a drawer, perceive the framing of a view, understand the way materials join, or how they may have been reinvigorated from an earlier life.

Our interest in the process of making, in turn leads to inventing new ways of making, to a strong material presence in our work that engages all of the senses.

Art and Architecture

Our practice has been fortunate to work with several of Australia’s most respected artists. They include Fiona Hall, Rose Nolan, Peter Kennedy, Judy Watson, Rosslynd Piggott, Dani Marti, Peter Hennessey and Simon Perry. This has been with the strong support and involvement of our clients. In every instance the process of working with an artist has encouraged us to reconsider our building’s relationship to the public realm and has enriched our architecture.

The integration of each work into the fabric of a building is our aim, in a way that makes a clear demarcation between art and architecture, but also makes it feel part of the whole urban ensemble. One of the earliest examples of this was when Peter Kennedy was commissioned by our Practice to create a 36-metre long artwork that runs the length of the window of our office in 2001. The neon artwork is entitled “A n d S o...Illumination 1.” In this case we were both client and architect, and able to see at first hand the powerful connection to the city and the completely different method of engaging with architecture, created by the involvement of an artist.