August 27, 2026
Celebrating 100 years of our people and practice in Brisbane and Sydney
Generations of BVNers, collaborators and friends gathered to celebrate a century of architecture in Australia and around the world.
Our responsibility is not to preserve the practice exactly as we inherited it. It is to ensure it continues to evolve.
Ali Bounds, co-CEO BVN
August 2026 marked 100 years since Arthur Bligh established his sole practice in Toowoomba in regional Queensland. Events in Brisbane and Sydney on Wednesday 19 and Thursday 20 August respectively officially celebrated the anniversary, with celebrations to follow in London. Current BVNers, principals and clients were joined at the State Library of Queensland and the Sydney Town Hall by former principals, alums and collaborators to honour the talent, dedication and vision of the many who have contributed to our story.
Former principals Graham Bligh, Robert Gardner, Jon Voller, Noel Robinson, Chris Clarke, Phil Tait, Chris Alcock, Shane Thompson, James Grose, Mark Grimmer and Paul Jones attended the celebrations in Brisbane, while Lawrence Neild, Sarita Chand, John Watmore, Andrew Cortese, Abbie Galvin, Ninotschka Titchkosky and Jane Williams joined the Sydney event.
As Neil Logan, BVN Co-CEO noted in his speech, past leaders formed the foundations of the practice’s values, expertise and legacy, and their collective influence lives within every project. “They did not simply design buildings. They built BVN.”
Looking to the future, Neil and Ali launched the BVN Foundation on behalf of the principals. A new platform for advocacy, research and knowledge-sharing, its first act will be to bring together BVN's vast alumni network of architects, designers and collaborators to consult with and work together to guide its purpose and future.
If the past represents our inheritance and the present represents our stewardship, then the future represents our responsibility… The BVN Foundation ensures that our collective creativity continues to grow long after any one of us has finished our own chapter.
Ali Bounds, co-CEO BVN
After engaging Welcomes to Country delivered by Wakka Wakka man David Williams, the events launched BVN, Becoming: Stories of Time and Place, published by Uro Publications. Publisher Andrew Mackenzie shared some reflections and observations about the experience of developing a book that presents a perspective of architecture at a moment in time – through the BVN lens. Models and artefacts from the BVN100 microsite were displayed throughout the event spaces as manifestations of the practice’s timeline and some of the stories behind the projects and people.
Acknowledging that BVN today is a custodian of the legacy built by those who came before, Ali Bounds observed that contemporary challenges meant architecture has become more complex. “Our responsibility has become broader, yet our purpose remains remarkably consistent: Collective creativity to design a better future.
“That is not simply a statement about architecture,” said Ali. “It is a statement about how we choose to work together, because our greatest strength has never been any individual project. It has always been our people.”
Neil Logan ended the event by considering what BVN’s next generation of designers might become.
Our hope is they will recognise that this generation, like those before us, understood its responsibility – that we honoured the past without becoming captive to it and that we cared for the present while preparing others for the future. And that we understood the true measure of a practice is not what it creates for itself, but what it enables others to create after it.
Neil Logan, co-CEO BVN
