The Mill
Honourable Mention - 2025 AA Prize for Unbuilt Work
Ariani Anwar
The Mill is a conceptual proposal for quiet preservation.
Situated on the former Alphington paper Mill site, the project reimagines the Boiler House as a vessel for memory, community and renewal.
Rather than build over the past, The Mill proposes to work with it. It is an architecture of restraint, preserving the industrial shell and gently stitching it into the present through landscape, bioremediation and adaptive reuse.
Programmed interventions wrap around the existing structure. From open air gathering, riverside rewilding and quiet moments of reflection.
This project is a meditation on time, decay and memory.
“The Mill is a thoughtful and insightful exploration of urban brownfield sites’ latent value, heritage and societal energy. Proposing an alternative future for the recently demolished Boiler House at Alphington Paper Mill in inner Melbourne, this scheme speculates how our existing industrial sites may be adapted and given useful second lives.
As well as rigorous internal programming, a range of landscape interventions and community uses are posited around the boiler house to assist with the site’s bioremediation and the river frontage’s rejuvenation.
These silent relics are a rapidly disappearing typology, lost to the homogenisation of planning and industry and now pushed to industrial parks on our suburban fringes away from public eyes and meaningful use.
Here, an inner-urban marvel, now lost to time, shows that these sites can do more than just hold embodied carbon and tell old stories: they can be delightfully strange civic gifts.”
— AA Jury Citation