Gregory Burgess graduated from the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne in 1970. For the past thirty-two years he has led the Melbourne architectural practice known as Gregory Burgess Architects, for which he is the principal designer. Over this period he has established an international reputation through a body of work including housing, community, cultural, educational, health, religious, commercial and urban design projects. Most notable among these buildings are the Eltham Library, Melbourne Theological College, Brambuk Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Box Hill Community Arts Centre, Uluru-Kata Tjuta Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Horsham Church of Michael and St John, Woolamai Surf Club, Twelve Apostles Visitor Centre and Myer Music Bowl Refurbishment. For this work Mr Burgess has received over forty professional and community awards, including the Sir Zelman Cowen Award (awarded annually for the best building in Australia), the Victorian Architecture Medal (for the premier Victorian Architect) and the RAlA Gold Medal (Career Award for the premier Australian Architect). He has received international awards for the most innovative architecture in the Commonwealth and for the most outstanding architecture in the Asia Pacific. His architectural work has been exhibited at major galleries and museums in London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Edinburgh and all Australian cities. It has been widely published in professional books and journals, including most major international architectural journals. Gregory Burgess has been a regular guest lecturer and critic in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne and has taught at many other Australian architecture schools. He has been a regular invited speaker at international conferences on architecture and architectural education. Peter Davey, editor of the eminent international journal Architectural Review, has included Burgess among a select group of architects on the global stage who "... tend the flame of hope and carry the lamp of truth in a world that seems increasingly to have no values other than profit and the market in its grossest form". His work has been widely studied and critiqued within the academy where it is regarded as at the cutting edge of architectural practice in several main ways. At an aesthetic level Mr Burgess' work is exquisitely beautiful and radically innovative; at once both avant garde and popular, it is an architecture that catches the public imagination. Mr Burgess has also been at the forefront of community architecture, a practice of involving local communities in more than a token manner and demonstrating that common interests are not served by the lowest common denominator. Gregory Burgess' work engages in architecture as a social art-raising the bar of community life, constructing new possibilities for social life and social identity. This work also celebrates architecture as an ecological art; pushing the cutting edge of sustainability at more than a technical level; integrating social and environmental sustainability. These different threads of Gregory Burgess's work are exemplified in a number of works for and with Aboriginal communities where the task of architectural design is fraught with the tensions of national politics, cultural tourism and the struggles of Aboriginal communities for social justice and reconciliation. The architecture of Gregory Burgess as a social and ecological art of placemaking has long been at the forefront of new constructions of Australian identity and Australian life. This honorary Doctorate acknowledges the significant artistic, social, environmental and intellectual contribution of Gregory Burgess.
