Celebrating Sustainability

The 2025 Architecture & Design Sustainability Awards celebrate excellence in sustainable building design and innovation across Australia. On the shortlist are two projects OCULUS delivered landscape architecture for, both on Wurundjeri Country: 

• Northern Memorial Park Depot designed by Searle x Waldron Architecture is a two-storey mass-timber operations hub for the Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust which challenges the conventional typology of a Depot by providing a beautiful workplace for people who work in emotionally challenging roles, dealing daily with grief and loss. Designed around existing trees, we identified ways to retain important habitat and improve ecological connectivity across the site. New Woody Meadows feature low-cost, resilient, novel, and diverse plantings of Australian native trees and shrubs, adding biodiversity and increasing nature connectedness.  
  
• Younghusband is an ambitious adaptive reuse project by Woods Bagot, setting new benchmarks in sustainable development and decarbonisation, that converted an underutilised industrial landscape into a vibrant, mixed-use community precinct. Our design integrates green façades and celebrates the re-use of bluestone paving, originally hand chiselled on site over 125 years ago, recut and re-laid for future generations. 

Now in their 19th year, the awards recognise individuals, practices, and projects that demonstrate outstanding commitment to environmental performance and social impact across the built environment. 

The winners will be unveiled on 19 November 2025, on Gadigal Country in Sydney, following the Sustainability Summit.