Kristen Whittle is an executive director of Bates Smart and architectural design leader for the Melbourne of office.

Educated at Manchester University in England, Kristen completed his postgraduate studies at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. He went on to work with Herzog and de Meuron in Basel, Switzerland and in London where he played a lead role in the prize-winning Laban Dance Centre and Tate Modern art gallery.

Over the past ten years, Kristen has had a special focus on healthcare design, bought to life through his work on the $1.2-billion Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, which won the 2012 Victorian Architecture Medal and was the health category winner at the 2012 World Architecture Festival. He also worked on the new Dandenong Hospital Mental Health Facility in Victoria, which won a National Architecture Award in 2014. Kristen and his team are currently designing what will be Australia’s leading private hospital redevelopments at the Cabrini Hospital in Malvern, Victoria, as well as completing the design for the $650-million Bendigo Hospital, which will open in January 2017 and will be the largest social infrastructure project ever undertaken in regional Victoria.