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Architectural Culture: New Perspectives 2018

21 November 2018

Graduating architecture students share their visions for Sydney and beyond

Designs for major precincts, sustainable high-density schools, obsolete car-park buildings and cultural facilities for remote Indigenous communities are among the projects shown in the 2018 Architecture Graduate Exhibition.

Graduating students from three programs - the Master of Architecture, the Bachelor of Design in Architecture, and the Bachelor of Architecture & Environments - will display outstanding ideas in design, planning and innovation, promoting architecture and all its manifestations in the built environment.

“The exhibition features a consistent display system that lets each of these three degrees highlight their distinctive educational objectives and imaginative speculations on architecture. Our focus is on research-based design teaching, and every project is framed around a series of important questions and challenges about architecture, its cultural setting, its technical ambitions and its capacity to speculate on uncertain futures," said Michael Tawa, Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture, Design and Planning.

Master of Architecture students selected from themes including the ‘State Archive for Architecture’ - a project intended to house a collection that draws on material from existing libraries, galleries and museums; ‘The Architecture of Postproduction: Rethinking Sydney’s Car Park Buildings’; as well as independent projects devised by students based on their individual interests.

Graduation is a transitional experience and every transition always means two things. We must leave something behind, including a part of ourselves, and we must take up something ahead, something not yet part of us, someone we are yet to become. The exceptional work featured in the Graduate Exhibition is testimony to this fact and this ambition.

Michael Tawa, Professor of Architecture

Master of Architecture student Anna Ewald-Rice worked in the remote Indigenous community of Warburton Ranges in Western Australia on the ‘Wilurarra Youth Artspace’: a project that aims to facilitate creativity and promote engagement and ownership.

Beginning with the possibility that many of Sydney’s car-park buildings might become functionally obsolete in the near future, student Matthew Bolton designed ‘Machinic Antagonism’. Matthew evacuates a rigid car-park structure, rendering it porous to the multiple activities of citizens: a new civic venue for democratic engagement, debate, demonstration and celebration.

‘Domain Threshold’ was the brief for Bachelor of Design in Architecture students. Between the dense city grid of Macquarie Street and the politically charged landscape of the Sydney Domain, students proposed a public space for performance, display and discussion. The project was framed around the site-based design processes of Danish architect Jørn Utzon, from which students were invited to imagine new architectural possibilities.

In her proposal, Meen Yee Ooi imagined an open and adaptable framework or infrastructure to activate the edge of the CBD and investigate the dematerialisation of architecture, of interior and exterior space.

In the Bachelor of Architecture and Environments program, students were presented with the opportunity to reflect on the challenges of designing a sustainable and healthy school campus in a dense, inner-city context. The project was framed with critical inputs from the development industry, planning, urban infrastructure and architectural science, with an emphasis on sustainability, energy use, climate change, transport and health.

“Through such projects, our students challenge themselves and imagine outstanding architectural ideas and propositions that extend the School’s distinguishing, long-standing attentiveness to critical intellectual engagement, social justice and making.” Said ProfessorTawa.

“Graduation is a transitional experience and every transition always means two things,” Professor Tawa said. ”We must leave something behind, including a part of ourselves, and we must take up something ahead, something not yet part of us, someone we are yet to become. The exceptional work featured in the Graduate Exhibition is testimony to this fact and this ambition.”

The 2018 Architecture Graduate Exhibition at the University of Sydney opens on 29 November.

This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of our sponsors:

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