i2C’s Perth Design Tour

i2C’s award winners from our 2022 Team Building have recently returned from their architecture and design tour to Perth!

Each year at our Team Building event i2C holds a Team Awards night. Before the weekend, the team vote for who they believe deserve to take out the title in each category.

The awards categories are Excellence, Flashes of Brilliance, Evolution, Rising Stars, Admin Hero, Under the Radar and Culture Hero. While each winner receives a trophy on the night, the main prize is a three-day design tour with i2C’s directors. The tours are designed to educate the team on other development outcomes, outside what i2C Architects produce to stretch their architectural knowledge and thinking.

The location and tour sites are curated by the directors and incorporate behind-the-scenes tours with developers, builders, project managers, architects and interior designers.

The architectural design tours started in 2016 and have been an annual event since. Sure enough, Covid prevented one of our Design Tours from going ahead. This year we were excited to make good on our promise and bring two groups of award winners together to share a design experience. The team invited to this year’s tour included Evolution award winners; Nick Dean, Maryanne Daher and Roman Mandyczewsky, Excellence award winners Joe Wright and Nick Dean; Flashes of Brilliance winner: Yazid Hussein, Rising Stars; Daniel Machaj, Kate Ellis and Anna Kang, Admin Hero; Michelle Booth, Culture Heros; Lauren Green, Jake Boydell, and Emma O’Reilly and Under the Radar winner; Ben Fletcher.

Creating a tour for a group this size was going to take some serious planning. The initial challenge is to decide on a location where the group can gain knowledge, insights and an understanding of a variety of different buildings, spaces and architecture. Sending them somewhere they may not have been to before is part of the fun. We decided on a city that we’d never held a design tour in before, Perth!

While we share the location with the group, most details about the tour are kept under wraps until they arrive at the airport when we share the dedicated design tour website with the team. The first two days of the tour are pretty intense with detailed architectural site visits and tours of Elizabeth Quay, Element 27 BTR apartments, Scarborough Beach Pool, Karrinyup Shopping Centre, The Food Innovation Precinct Western Australia, My Home’s passive house foundation housing and WA Museum Boola Bardip. The personalised tours provide insight into each project and give the team a deeper understanding of the design considerations and learnings associated with each.

While the focus of the tour is inspired by local architecture, it’s also a great opportunity for the team to connect while seeing some local attractions. You can’t go over to Perth without watching the sunset over the ocean, going for a swim at Cottesloe beach, enjoying the view from Kings Park, drinking a pale ale at Little Creatures Brewery and walking the historic streets of Fremantle so we factor some of the fun stuff into the tour as well.

The design tour isn’t possible without the generosity of clients, project managers, builders, architects, and town planners taking time out to share their knowledge with us. Thank you, Urban Design Consultant Annalise Safstrom and the teams, at Sentinel, Cooper & Oxley, GPT, Proven Project Management, The Shire of Murray, My Home and the WA Museum Boola Bardip for the informative tours and time you spent with our team. 

The feedback from the award winners about the design tour has been great. We look forward to seeing who the next set of i2C award winners are and where the next design tour takes them!