The tour includes Burgess Architects’ open studio, Greg’s personal workspace and other working and storage spaces. The space, a former bronze foundry in industrial Richmond, was home to Gregory Burgess Architects for 20 years. The 3D tour includes extensive annotations of Burgess projects and points of interest, alongside a series of short videos featuring Greg and others discussing his life and work.

In 2020 and 2021, a team from the Melbourne School of Design and the Robin Boyd Foundation worked with Burgess to catalogue and relocate Burgess’ archives from his former studio in York Street, Richmond to a new customised storage and research facility in Sidonia, northwest of Melbourne. The archiving team catalogued over 400 physical models, almost 600 tubes of large-format drawings and 220 boxes of project files – a lifetime of architectural work. Prior to relocating the archive, a team from the Robin Boyd Foundation recorded a 3D scan and virtual tour of the York Street Studio, documenting the collection in its original context. 

The Greg Burgess Archives is an ongoing archival project to catalogue, preserve and celebrate the work of Gregory Burgess Architects. A collaboration between Burgess, The Melbourne School of Design and the Robin Boyd Foundation, the archive contains more than 50 years of models, drawings and files spanning Burgess’ architectural career. Gregory Burgess is a unique figure in Australian architecture. Since 1972, Burgess has produced work throughout Australia with an emphasis on architecture as a social, healing and ecological art. Key works include the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre and the Brambuk Living Cultural Centre in Gariwerd, Victoria. Many of Burgess’ most important projects have emerged from his collaborative and research-intensive design process, particularly while working alongside Indigenous Australians. Burgess has been the recipient of numerous architectural awards, is a Life Fellow of the AIA and recipient of the 2004 AIA Gold Medal for distinguished service by an Australian architect.

Building an Archive

We acknowledge and are very grateful of the contributions of our project partners: