The prize celebrates Pelletier’s significant contributions to the industry, design excellence, and community engagement.

One of her most notable projects, the Blacktown Animal Rehoming Centre, has been recognised nationally and internationally for its innovative approach to animal welfare and public architecture.

She sits down with Clémence Carayol from Architecture & Design to discuss this achievement.

Architecture & Design: Congratulations on winning the 2025 Emerging Architect Prize! What does this recognition mean to you personally and professionally at this stage in your career?

To say it means a lot is an understatement. Professionally, I can see this award benchmarks me with some of the most extraordinary individuals in our profession who have received this award before me. For this I am both humbled and a little terrified of continuing to earn this place.

This is especially so as the attributes it acknowledges are such core components of our profession (commitment to architectural excellence, involvement and leadership in the profession and community engagement). Personally, I feel seen, that the hard slog has not gone unnoticed. I am both grateful and excited to continue the advocacy of other emerging architects, as I too have been advocated for.

The prize celebrates contributions to practice, education, design excellence, and community involvement. Can you share a project or initiative that you feel best embodies these values?

I would say that the Blacktown Animal Rehoming Centre (BARC) embodies these values the most. BARC is the largest Council-run shelter in the southern hemisphere. It opened just as COVID concluded, and since then has been inundated with surrendered and lost pets due to the huge increase in pet ownership during the lockdowns.

Like all projects and initiatives I have been part of, I am just one of many contributors to BARC. This project is the culmination of eight years of research by Sam Crawford Architects, of multiple concepts and business cases, documenting and commencing construction through COVID, and now the wonderful task of sharing the lessons learned with my peers.

I joined the project 18 months after it commenced, at which point funding was in question and we had to recommence the concept phase. Collating all the research to date, and undertaking more of my own, I helped structure an operational program for the facility in the absence of an operating team at the time. This then helped shape the ongoing detailed design, documentation, and delivery of this unique facility.

We designed the centre to prioritise the mental welfare of staff and animals alike, by providing constant engagement with nature, protecting against disease, and facilitating retreat and respite when needed. Not as a home for animals, but as an enabler to getting them into their forever homes.

The buildings are designed as a junction between functional farming style sheds and sweeping civic scale public buildings, all of which stretch towards and interlock with the Western Sydney Parklands. We worked with Sonia van der Haar of Lymesmith on an integrated art strategy and a colour scheme derived from local bird life, and we then codified the spaces with those colours to improve way-finding and inject a sense of play.

This was all within a really modest budget, and a very large footprint. The project has been recognised in award programs nationally and internationally and I hope is a source of pride for the Blacktown community. Since it has been completed, I have also been fortunate to speak at student workshops, present lessons learned at universities and to my peerage.

I have also had the opportunity to apply these lessons, and continue to learn about this complex typology, through work with Camden Council for whom we’re designing a new animal rehoming centre and community nursery. As a firm that specialises in many architectural typologies, I am always excited by the cross-pollination of the skills learned in one being applied to another.

For example, our work with colour and sensory sensitivities, coupled with durable finishes, and replicable detailing, has been utilised on some of our education and childcare projects. It’s been an amazing journey, and I continue to learn from it.

As Associate Director at Sam Crawford Architects, how have you shaped or influenced the practice’s direction or ethos?

I’ll be perfectly honest – it’s impossible to differentiate my own contribution from Sam Crawford’s positive driving force, or the organic growth that occurs as a result of our multi-talented team. I can however comment on where my passions sit within the workplace and praxis generally.

Eight years ago when I joined SCA, my first act was to implement a birthday cake buddy system to ensure that everyone was celebrated as an individual, and the office benefited from regular cake. I would say this embodies my ethos for the practice.

The capacity of each individual is immense; they are all makers and creators. Celebrating who they are, and the lives they live inside and outside their work enriches and evolves our praxis, and as a team we all benefit. This is reinforced through the incredible agency Sam gives all of us to design and manage our work.

Directionally, I would say my passion has been in driving the practice’s focus towards a deeper engagement with the science of sustainability. We, like everyone, have a long way to go, but together with the incredible passion in our team I know we’re slowly improving our environmental impact one project at a time.

Architecture has a profound role in the public arena. How do you see architects contributing more meaningfully to communities in the years ahead?

Architects have a lot to contribute. As a profession our knowledge and skill set in the macro and micro concerns of our communities is profound. Despite this, I continually see our absence from the key strategic discussions, and then witness the resulting regret at the wasted resources once an architect is included at the table, and the project course is corrected.

Adam Haddow, our AIA National President, has been advocating for the creation of a national government architect. I see this as that future. Architects involved in federal level budget discussions, policy creation, design advocation, and environmental planning. An architect’s ability to see the large-scale strategic solution, whilst considering the steps of real-world implementation, would facilitate and hopefully mitigate many of the issues we experience ‘on the ground’ with allocation of spending and urban growth oversight.

That said, there has been a large growth of opportunities to involve the skills of architects in design development. I’ve been fortunate enough to sit on a number of design excellence panels at local government and state levels and see the significant contribution that architects, planners and landscape architects can have on a project scale.

Similarly, I have also been part of national and state level Australian Institute of Architects working groups who review and facilitate policy changes within NSW and across the country. All of this work is incredibly positive, influencing projects and policies that have already been conceived. Contributing to their formation - this is what I see as the vital role of a national government architect.

Emerging architects often face unique challenges. What advice would you give to those just starting out in the profession today?

Only you can realise your goals and passions, so find the right place to work and people to work with who will support you doing so. We have had a culture of criticism for too long, within which individuals feel they gain power by shining a negative light on the work of their peers.

We need to advocate for ourselves, for each other, and for the profession. Always lift up the people around you, and you will rise with them.

Image: Gabrielle Pelletier / supplied

Clémence Carayol

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