Nonda Katsalidis


Nonda Katsalidis is a Greek-Australian architect. He is currently a practicing director of architecture firm Fender Katsalidis Architects in partnership with Karl Fender.

Biography

Early life

Nonda Katsalidis was born in 1951 in Athens, Greece. He migrated to Melbourne, Australia when he was five years old, with his two-year-old brother and parents. He graduated from the University of Melbourne with a degree in architecture in 1976.

Career

From 1979 until 1983, he practised architecture alone on small projects. Among his earliest works, in 1972, was the Cafe Byzantium at 312 Drummond Street in Carlton Melbourne. He went on to design the nearby Deutscher Gallery and residence at 68 Drummond Street in 1983. In 1984, he designed the award-winning Metro Brasserie, 41 Bourke Street. The same year, he formed a small practice and in 1990, it had become an established company.
He designed a number of striking buildings on Latrobe Street which gained him attention as an upcoming designer and one of the youngest architects designing tall office buildings, culminating in the award-winning Argus Centre in 1991. In 1992, he gained a master's degree at RMIT. In 1996, he established Nation Fender Katsalidis, but due to Bob Nation's withdrawal from the partnership, it became Fender Katsalidis.
His big break was with his award-winning Melbourne Mondo Terrace Apartments, implemented as one of the first buildings under the Postcode 3000 planning strategy for increasing the residential population of Melbourne city centre. In 2002, the Government of Victoria's new planning blueprint ResCode was released, citing St Leonard's Apartments and Melbourne Terrace as two out of three examples of the model for medium-density housing in metropolitan Melbourne. He then became known for his cutting edge high-rise residential tower designs and became a developer of some of Australia's tallest residential buildings, such as the Eureka Tower.
He became a commercial architect and now participates in the financing and development of his designs which have evolved to be more subdued than his previous work.

Selected works