100 Years of Collective Creativity

It’s official. We’re 100! We are the sum of our stories, ideas and aspirations over 100 years of architectural practice in Australia and around the world.

In August 1926, Arthur Bligh, our founding principal, set in motion a trajectory of architectural endeavour defined by curiosity, reinvention and collective effort that has endured for 100 years. Through recession, war, boom times, low times and a new millennium, 44 principals have passed on the baton of shared partnership and authorship, bolstered by thousands of alums, countless collaborators, clients, supporters and friends, united by a shared purpose to design a better future.

So here we are, a century later, looking to the future with optimism and gratitude for those who have persevered, fostering the belief that architecture matters to society and pursuing that with integrity, creativity and care.

Our history includes uncertainty, debate and moments of reinvention. The richness of our story comes from the richness of who we are: people with different influences, different spheres of experience and different ways of seeing. That collective depth is our character, accumulated over 100 years.

To bring gravitas to our centenary, we are celebrating the people, projects and pivotal moments that have defined us through an interactive digital archive, a special publication with Uro, plus lots more still to come.

By surfacing historic recordings, archival finds and a plethora of photographs, drawings and models, we assembled them for the digital world and created BVN100.com. The site is conceived as a landscape of artefacts and curios tracing a century of our people, culture and architecture. Paired with each design artefact is a story of influence and belonging rooted in our 100-year history.

Our timeline explores BVN from 1926 to today, told through the people and pivotal moments that defined each decade of our history. From Arthur Bligh's sole practice established in 1926 in Toowoomba, regional Queensland, to studios in Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, New York and London, BVN has grown through the talent, dedication and vision of the many who have each contributed to the practice's story.

Published by Uro Publications, BVN, Becoming: Stories of Time and Place was imagined in the spirit of a novel rather than a fan deck of buildings, revealing architecture as it is lived. A reflection on selected BVN works, it is a book about people, place and the slow accumulation of belonging.

Essays by Archie Moore, Esther Anatolitis, James Grose, Andrew Mackenzie and Kevin O’Brien are woven together with poems by Agatha Gothe-Snape and Jaimee Edwards, plus Les Murray’s landmark 1984 poem, ’Louvres’.

We take this moment of celebration as an opportunity to make visible what isn’t always obvious: the values that underpin the work, the purpose behind it and the people who made it happen.

Looking back to look forward, we see something built on people, values and genuine curiosity about the future. That's reason enough to face it with optimism.

We invite you to be part of our centenary; seize the moment and reconnect. To read more about our 100 years of collective creativity, head over to BVN100.com