Creating a City with Meaning

As well as being an author and editor, Michael Heyward is the managing director and publisher for Text Publishing, a multi-award-winning independent publishing company in Melbourne.

Text publishes Australian and international authors, including Barack Obama, Kate Grenville, Helen Garner, Tim Flannery, Yann Martel, Peter Temple, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Lloyd Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, J.M. Coetzee, Graeme Simsion, Elena Ferrante, Gail Jones, Niccolò Ammaniti, Magda Szubanski, John McPhee, Herman Koch, and Gerald Murnane.

Shelley Penn is a Melbourne-based architect whose work includes strategic advice to government and the private sector on architectural and urban design for public places across all scales, with her major focus being design evaluation and review. Her project work has been published and exhibited nationally and internationally, and has received a number of awards.

Shelley was the associate Victorian Government Architect for four years from 2006. She has also been design director in the Office of the NSW Government Architect in 2000-01.

In mid-2011, Shelley co-chaired a major review of the planning processes for Barangaroo, a 22 hectare, $6bn development located at the north-western edge of Sydney’s CBD. She is a member of the Victorian Design Review Panel and the Capital City Design Review Panel in South Australia. She was a board member of the Architects Registration Board of Victoria, a board member of the Linking Melbourne Authority, and was deputy chair of the Heritage Council of Victoria until mid-2012.

In other roles, she is Adjunct Professor in Architecture Practice at Monash University, and an associate professor in Architecture at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, where she also recently completed a term as Chair of the Architecture Advisory Board. Shelley is a Past National President of the Australian Institute of Architects, and is currently Chair of the National Capital Authority, the Commonwealth’s Statutory Authority charged with planning, developing, maintaining and promoting Australia’s National Capital.

Through her practice, advocacy and advisory work, and in all of her roles, Shelley is committed to contributing to culture, and to improving social equity, sustainability and well-being, through good governance and the poetic capacity of high quality architecture and public places.

Rodney Eggleston is an architect and founding director of March Studio. Eggleston trained and taught at RMIT University, followed by a short but informative two-year stint working for Rem Koolhaas at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam. He returned to Australia and in 2007 and set up March Studio with French native artist Anne-Laure Cavigneaux (1980).

March Studio represent a new generation of architects in Australia who have been educated in a digital environment but embrace the fundamental elements of making and innovation to realise their projects. The outcomes of this particular mix are highly crafted projects born and refined through the utilisation of a digital and computational process, but also embedded in a thorough knowledge of materials and construction.

Kerstin Thompson is principal of Kerstin Thompson Architects – a Melbourne-based architecture, landscape and urban design practice with projects in Australia and New Zealand. She is also professor of design in architecture at VUW and adjunct professor at RMIT and Monash Universities.

Her work has received numerous awards and local and international recognition through publication and exhibition. She has been a member of the federal government’s BEIIC Advisory Committee, was the creative director for the highly successful 2005 RAIA National Conference and one of the creative directors for Australia’s 2008 Venice Biennale exhibition.

She is currently on the OVGA’s Design Review Panel. KTA undertakes work for public and private sector clients including the Victoria Police, Metropolitan Fire Brigade, Royal Botanical Gardens and numerous Universities. Recently awarded projects include Marysville Police Station, the House at Hanging Rock, Birralee Primary and Studio 9 Wertheim Factory conversion.

The practice focus is on architecture as a civic endeavor with an emphasis on the users’ experience and enjoyment of place.

Jon Clements is a founding director of Jackson Clements Burrows Architects (JCB). JCB was established in Melbourne in 1998 and the practice currently employs approximately 40 architects and interior designers.

JCB have delivered a very diverse range of projects throughout Australia and overseas and their built work has been widely published in the local and international media. Many of their projects have been recognised through RAIA and Industry awards.

Jon continues to maintain an active role outside practice representing architecture within the industry. Jon was the president of the Victorian Chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects from 2012 to 2014 and he is the current national president elect.