An exhibition of architectural drawings by Connor Aislabie, Hamish Beattie-Craven, Alice Charles, Adam Clark, William du Toit, Travis Hinchliff, Thomas Jackson, Jonathan Morrish, May Myo Min, Rory Patterson, Michael Weir, Ryan Western, and Nicholas Wilkey Curated by Daniel K. Brown
FREE ENTRY Tuesday–Sunday, 11am–5pm Te Herenga Waka ––Victoria University of Wellington Gate 3, Kelburn Parade adamartgallery.org.nz
Cover image: William du Toit The Aerial Cableway 2021 digital collage: pen and ink on paper, digital weaving 750mm x 600mm courtesy of the artist
But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had overreached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine. — E. M. Forster, ‘The Machine Stops’
The Machine Stops is a group show of allegorical architectural projects concerned with cultural identity, natural history and global ecologies. Here, postgraduate research students from Te Kura Waihanga Wellington School of Architecture reflect on how a speculative drawing practice can help reawaken environmental, societal and cultural narratives that represent the heritage of Aotearoa, even when these tales may only be visible as scattered fragments in the landscape. These allegorical projects ask: how can the history and decayed state of scarred sites be proactively used in their rejuvenation? How can their tragic stories be remembered as important lessons for future generations? The Machine Stops reflects how the creative disciplines, united through storytelling, can have a positive impact on addressing our environmental, societal and cultural concerns. The exhibition represents a collection of allegorical architectural projects –– stories about environmental destruction, social disparities, and cultural loss –– told through the voice of speculative architecture.
The title of the exhibition is taken from E. M. Forster’s 1909 short story ‘The Machine Stops’. In Forster’s story, society relies on technology to provide for all its needs – and when the machine breaks down, civilisation collapses. Examples of social and environmental devastation are visible to all of us. Cataclysmic events from centuries ago remain as permanent scars upon the landscape; culverted streams remain forever visible as open wounds upon the land. As James Joyce wrote in the margins of his novel Ulysses, ‘places remember events’. A tree branch cracking in the wind, fragments of stone tumbling down a hillside – the natural environment calls out in whispers and whimpering groans, its unique form of storytelling audible to us all. We have only to pause and listen. And behind all the uproar was silence, the silence which is the voice of the earth and of the generations who have gone .... Only the whispers remained, and the little whimpering groans. — E. M. Forster, ‘The Machine Stops’
Each allegorical architectural work references a related quote from allegorical literature, pūrākau (oral narratives), poetry and film.
Te Pataka Toi Adam Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Faculties of Science, Health, Engineering, Architecture and Design Innovation, Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington.
Daniel K. Brown is Professor of Design Studio in the Te Kura Waihanga Wellington School of Architecture at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. He completed a Master of Architecture degree at Yale University in 1982 and thereafter embarked on a 14-year professional career as an architect, culminating in his role as Vice-President of leading New York architectural firm Emilio Ambasz and Associates. He took up an academic position at Victoria University of Wellington in 1998 where he plays a full and active role in academic life. Brown has been acknowledged for the excellence of his research and teaching. In 2010 a five-
year retrospective of his architectural research was presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In August 2021, Brown and seven of his students from his ‘Narrative Architecture’ master’s thesis stream were featured in a special edition of AD [Architectural Design]: Emerging Talents / Training Architects. Edited by Neil Spiller, the publication showcased Brown’s ‘The Allegorical Architectural Project’ as an instance of ‘pushing the envelope of architecture in extraordinary ways’. This exhibition expands upon that presentation to grant local audiences first-hand access to the outputs of this innovative pedagogical project.
Alice Charles An Artefact of Time 2021 graphite on paper, digitally collaged And then the shards of the original splendor that had been saved … were now preserved under glass bells, … and not because they might still be used for anything, but because people wanted to reconstruct through them a city of which no one knew anything now. — Italo Calvino
Charles’s An Artefact of Time draws from Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities. Fragments of time and place are curated in a glass bell jar. A vertical wall and cantilevered beams support the fractured voices, enabling them to grow and be heard. The natural environment, still alive beneath the city, extends its roots along the architectural floor. Its tendrils interweave with the fragmented voices, holding time and place in suspension.
Alice Charles Unveiling an Artefact of Time 2021 graphite on paper, digitally collaged A woman in black comes along, showing her full age, her eyes restless beneath her veil, her lips trembling. ... Something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene.... — Italo Calvino
In Unveiling an Artefact of Time, fragments of time and place move in and out of the half-light beneath the veil. Fragments of place evolve; fragments of time realign. Hidden traces of the environment re-emerge. The veil moves softly, concealing and revealing, connecting and disconnecting. Stories of place appear, only to disappear once more.
Alice Charles Vessel for a Codex 2021 digital collage: historic map, digital model, heritage photograph, notation marks, text The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins. — Italo Calvino
Vessel for a Codex unveils lost voices of place and time that are only visible as fragments upon the landscape. The layers appear like horizontal palimpsests, negotiating time and identity, pausing and leaping forward, converging and separating again. They leave traces upon one another. Each layer calls out in its own voice, relevant to its own period of time – their combined voices a cacophony of fragile cries.
May Myo Min Inside the Game 2020 digital collage, photograph of physical model shadows, notation marks, text I have not written my history. They have written it for me, those academics. They have written their own versions. What they have written were mythologies sprinkled with gold dust. How many sprinkles did I amount to in there? They have written my history. ... Then they have airbrushed me from history. My history has just begun. I am going to write my own history. — Zehar Lynn
Myo Min’s work reflects on Burmese poet Zehar Lynn’s poem ‘My History is Not Mine’. Inside the Game invites us to define our own cultural history. The shadows of culture illuminate our path. The architecture of our imagination becomes our context. Darkness and light are inverted; oral narratives come to life. Inside the game.
Michael Weir The Sorcerer and the Artisan 2021 gold foam, fibreboard, plaster, ABS filament, artist’s mull, plaster, wire, acrylic paint We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. ... Each morning … we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. — Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Michael Weir’s The Sorcerer and the Artisan sets out to shift our thinking from the anthropocentric perspectives responsible for our current environmental challenges into an eco-centric way of ‘rhizomatic’ thinking, postulated by philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus. Weir’s speculative architectural artefacts perpetually reconstruct themselves out of the waste that they generate, emulating and integrating the ubiquitous presence of the natural systems into our built environments.
Thomas Jackson Atlas Shrugged | Residue 2021 fabric, ink on paper, card, fibreboard, timber, bicycle cable, ABS filament, metal pins If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders – What would you tell him?… ... To shrug. — Ayn Rand
Jackson’s work draws on Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged to enhance our awareness of the causes behind economic, social and environmental devastation. He redeploys residual fragments from New Brighton’s abandoned buildings, situating them as architectural lures to expose the ‘palimpsestuous’ underbelly of post-earthquake New Brighton.
Adam Clark (Ngāti Maniapoto and Ngāti Hauā) Te Whare Atapō: The House Before Dawn 2021 digital collage, canvas, muka flax, wool, feathers, rimu, stainless steel rods, card, paint Pūrākau are a collection of traditional oral narratives that should not only be protected, but also understood as a pedagogical-based anthology of literature that are still relevant today... — Jenny Lee, ‘Decolonising Māori Narratives: Pūrākau as a Method’
Clark’s work draws upon a pūrākau (traditional Māori oral narrative) to help reconnect disenfranchised Māori youth with their culture and whakapapa. In this pūrākau, Hinetītama, the dawn maiden, is represented in the upper collage, while Hine-nui-te-pō, guardian of the night, is represented in the lower collage. The central collage represents the threshold where both become one – light is shared with the darkness. The background represents Hine-tītama and Hine-nui-te-pō’s evolution across the timescape of a day.
Ryan Western The Engraver’s Craft 2020 digital collage, physical model photograph, topographic map, notation marks, text The cut of the burin’s point symbolizes the rock drill penetrating the resistant depths. From the moment of its very first, sketchy movement against a hard material, a primeval tension determines in the hand that the entire being shall continue to strain. — Gaston Bachelard
Western reflects on Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s biography The Hand of the Engraver: Albert Flocon Meets Gaston Bachelard. Architectural ‘engraving tools’ appear to scratch the tragic story of Quartz Reef Point’s abandoned strip mine onto the scarred New Zealand terrain. The architectural interventions represent a bridge, a burin (an engraving tool used to scratch a copper plate), a vessel, an observatory and a matrix.
Ryan Western The Engraver’s Landscape 2020 digital collage, site photographs, topographic map, notation marks, text [T]he engraver’s landscape is a disposition or outburst of will, an activity that is impatient to come to grips with the world. The engraver sets a world in motion, … provoking the forces that lie dormant in a flat universe. Provocation is his way of creating. — Gaston Bachelard
Architectural models of the engraver’s landscape cast shadows upon the ‘engraving plate’ below. With the destruction of the environmental systems, only isolated fragments of the original site remain. The architectural interventions sited upon these fragments represent an allegorical gateway, an observatory, a vessel, a bridge and a burin.
William du Toit The Stamper Battery 2021 digital collage: ink on paper, digital amalgamation But Humanity ... had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine. — E. M. Forster
Du Toit uses E. M. Forster’s short story ‘The Machine Stops’ to generate stories of place identity in New Zealand’s rural province of Otago, where hundreds of stamper batteries were imported into the region to crush stone during the 1860 gold rush. Du Toit’s work sets out to reawaken and safeguard these tales of environmental devastation, so that we may learn from them in the future. The Stamper Battery’s tale is defined by the echoes of grinding gears, explosive salvos and discordant wails.
William du Toit The Architectural Ruins 2021 digital collage: ink on paper, digital model and textures But to me [the hills] were living and the turf that covered them was a skin, ... and I felt that those hills had called with incalculable force to men in the past, and that men had loved them. — E. M. Forster
In The Architectural Ruins, we witness the natural environment’s tragic tale from the perspective of seven key contextual sites: the mineshaft, the aerial cableway, the stamper battery, the water race, the schist tailings, the redirected stream, and traces of an earlier battery swept away in a flood. Progressively all of the witnesses –– the machines and the natural landscape –– have decayed into ruin over time, lost forever.
William du Toit The Mineshaft 2021 digital collage: ink on paper, digital sluicing He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child. — E. M. Forster
In The Mineshaft, the tragic environmental tale is defined by deviation – a tale of conflicts between nature and mankind, told by the sound of keening. Shadows of elements in plan are extruded back towards the central pivot point, implying that there is a driving mechanism hidden in the void behind the drawing. Empty portals create a vacuum that begins to warp elements such as shadows and smudges. The shifting and notations act as registration marks aligning the voices below.
William du Toit The Aerial Cableway 2021 digital collage: ink on paper, digital weaving The better a man understood [the Machine], the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. — E. M. Forster
In The Aerial Cableway, the tragic environmental tale is defined by transitions – a system whose tale is told by the spaces between cries. Like the steel cables that connected the aerial cableway of the gold mining operations, projection lines are traced between important elements, highlighting the critical relationships between various elements. Registration marks identify the primary axes while simultaneously acknowledging the transitional nature of the narrative of the layered construction lines.
William du Toit The Water Race 2021 digital collage: ink on paper, digital excavation And behind all the uproar was silence — the silence which is the voice of the earth and of the generations who have gone. — E. M. Forster
In The Water Race, the tragic environmental tale is defined by cuts, tears and scars – lines drawn deep into the landscape. Its tale’s soft cries merge with the susurration of the stream below. Flat planes begin to inform the substructure beneath the drawing’s layers, changing from plan view into partial elevation views. Construction and projection lines from the drawing are peeled back to inform the allegory of the cut, revealing a quote from “The Machine Stops’ that was previously hidden within the substructure.
William du Toit The Schist Tailings 2021 digital collage: ink on paper, digital dripping Man, … who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. — E. M. Forster
In The Schist Tailings, the tragic environmental tale is defined by displacement. Its story of annihilation is told by a thousand shattered souls, their broken voices crying out in anguished whispers. Structural fins are shown shifting in their tracks, evidencing that the rectangular platform has been displaced from its orthographic foundation. Registration marks imply that some of the layers of the drawing have shifted relative to each other, while other elements blur and warp due to this displacement.
William du Toit Lamentations 2021 digital collage: ink on paper, digital model and textures Only the whispers remained, and the little whimpering groans..... For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky. — E. M. Forster
In Lamentations, the mountainside and the machines have fallen, fragmented and decayed. Their voices clamour and cry out, radiate and recede, repudiate and lament. All seven stories are layered into one meta-narrative composition, allowing all of the characters’ voices to be heard at once—some as quiet whispers in the background, others crying out in the forefront. From this meta-composition the confrontation between the environmental systems and the man-made systems becomes apparent.
Hamish Beattie-Craven In the Generative Cell 2015 digital model with textures collaged onto an inverted painting by Laura Hathaway But there is nothing left, no cry, no rumbling, no distant murmur; nor is the slightest outline discernible to indicate any distinctions, any three-dimensionality in these succeeding planes that were once houses, palaces, avenues. — Alain Robbe-Grillet
Beattie-Craven draws on Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel Topology of a Phantom City to reflect on an environmental crisis in Baruni Dump, Papua New Guinea, where populations of slum dwellers represent a wide variety of cultures in constant flux. The architectural plan is anchored by two nodes that provide sanitation, water and waste processing. The main axis dictates the fluctuating positions of the communities within.
Hamish Beattie-Craven Construction of a Ruined Temple 2015 digital collage: digital model, digital colour and textures Before I fall asleep the city once more rears before my pallid face, my features marked by age and fatigue, rears high before me, far behind me, ... blackened walls, mutilated statues, twisted ironwork, ruined colonnades whose giant shafts lie smashed amidst the debris. — Alain Robbe-Grillet
In Construction of a Ruined Temple, a temple-like structure continually rebuilds itself from the waste of the landfill. It represents a sanctuary for inhabitants of the toxic site. Waste is uplifted, separated, processed, and then integrated into the structure. Meeting platforms, market spaces and public shelters are continually reconstructed. The everfluctuating Temple becomes a mechanism for community-making.
Nicholas Wilkey Gateway into the Repository of Shadows 2021 pen and ink on paper, digitally collaged Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in flight, searching the skies for dreams. — Haruki Murakami
Wilkey draws upon Haruki Murakami’s novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World to represent the threshold between the conscious and the subconscious from multiple architectural points of view. Each has been overlaid, obscured and reimagined as the collation and amalgamation of all the drawings that form the Repository of Shadows. These drawings represent a multitude of perspectives, a symphony of atmospheres ascending from light to shadow and receding back again.
Nicholas Wilkey Outside the Repository of Shadows 2020 pen and ink on paper, digitally collaged Yes we all had shadows. They were with us constantly. But when I came to this Town, my shadow was taken away. — Haruki Murakami
In Outside the Repository of Shadows, the Shadow Realm expands and contracts in spatio-temporal circumlocutions. Light is peeled away to reveal the Repository of Shadows as an architectural volume trans-forming over time. Shadows illuminate as well as obscure. The visual perception of shadows and their effects are ambiguous and slippery. It is through the shadows on a surface that we discover its qualities; the surface material disrupts the light energy, thus revealing its secrets, its form.
Nicholas Wilkey Inside the Repository of Shadows 2020 pen and ink on paper, digitally collaged Forget about the shadow. This is the End of the World. This is where the world ends. Nowhere further to go. — Haruki Murakami
In Inside the Repository of Shadows, everything is continually in motion. The layers rise and fall, inciting the architecture to reveal and conceal itself over time. The shadows are transitory, fleeting, shifting with the passing of time and with the movement of the viewer. Because a building is always at rest, the motion of shadow across its walls and surfaces reflects an eternal timepiece. Shadows fall either side of past and future, revealing the true place of human existence, the limina between light and dark.
Nicholas Wilkey The Shadow Grounds 2020 pen and ink on paper, digitally collaged The silence does not reside on the surface but is held like smoke within. It is unfathomable, eternal, a disembodied vision cast upon a point in the void. — Haruki Murakami
The Shadow Grounds represents the physical embodiment of a threshold. Multiple thresholds coalesce to create architecture. Shadows provide clues to the identity of a gateway, a gatehouse, a watch tower and a bridge below. The gatehouse sits upon two parallel tracks, captured, trapped in time. The fluid lines of the landscape become the striated lines of the architecture, blurring the boundary between the two. Shadows inhabit the page and define the Shadow Grounds through darkness.
Nicholas Wilkey The Gateway and the Gatehouse 2020 pen and ink on paper, digitally collaged The Wall looms behind the ruins of the house... It is not static. Its pulse too intense, its curves too sublime. — Haruki Murakami
In The Gateway and the Gatehouse, the repository of shadows’ gateway and gatehouse are situated in the shadow realm cast by the ‘wall’. The shadow realm moves, groans and creaks, only visible in moments of stillness captured in time. Shadows can be seen as both corporeal operation—bound to the physical cycles of earth, moon and sun—and metaphysical entity, alluding to the primordial darkness before the birth of light and matter.
Jonathan Morrish (Ngāti Ruanui) Poutūmārō | The Pinnacle, Midday 2021 digital collage, ink on paper, digital architectural render, digital colour and textures I feel with some passion that what we truly are is ... both external and internal ... and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike ‘identity’, must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest … is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity. — Philip Pullman Superimposing hostile frames of reference, it was often unclear whose side the component images were on, through whose interests they should be read… marginalised voices might speak through cracks or displacements in the dominant discourse. — Robert Leonard, ‘Shane Cotton: Cultural Surrealist’
Morrish draws on a novel by Philip Pullman, paintings by Shane Cotton, and Māori cultural narratives for his redesign of Te Aro Park’s toilet block and bus stop, which looks past the mask architecture wears, through the mirror, across timelines and into the sacred. Architecture becomes the guardian and the narrator of Te Aro Pā, whose ruins lie below.
Jonathan Morrish (Ngāti Ruanui) Haeata | Beam of Light, Sunrise 2021 digital collage, ink on paper, digital colour and textures This [rākau whakapapa] represents the flow of ancestral power (mana) along a particular line of descent from the divine ancestor (atua) down to the living holder... used as a memory aid for the orators when recounting their genealogy (whakapapa). Each projection on this staff represents a generation related to its owner. — Jenny Newell, ‘Pacific Art in Detail’ [Shane] Cotton’s paintings were figurative but hardly naturalistic, more symbolic— like heraldry. Cotton often used one image—shelving, a tree, scaffolding—to provide an organising system for others, creating systems of nested metaphor. Scale was not naturalistic but symbolic… — Robert Leonard, ‘Shane Cotton: Cultural Surrealist’
In Haeata | Beam of Light, Sunrise, a rākau whakapapa stands vigil, a sentinel chronicling the heritage identity of tangata whenua. To Morrish, the rākau whakapapa is a symbol for the soul of the people of the land. It observes, it protects, it remembers. The double rākau whakapapa bears witness to the future in one direction and to the past in the other.
Travis Hinchliff The Hero’s Journey: Crossing Thresholds 2021 digital collage The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find. — Joseph Campbell
Hinchliff draws upon Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero’s Journey to reflect on how our rites of passage are often situated within stories about the natural and built environments shared by a local community. Hinchliff’s collage uses Campbell’s work to reawaken shared community narratives to safeguard them for future generations.
Connor Aislabie We Are Nō. One 2021 digital collage My artwork becomes a conduit between te ao mārama, our present reality, and the spiritual realm of the atua; I purposefully re-present everyday objects as artworks to convey culturally specific narratives. — Hemi MacGregor
Aislabie draws on an installation by Hemi McGregor to enhance our awareness of the relationships that heritage stories have with our natural environment. In English, MacGregor’s work I Am Nō. One; You Are Nō. One represents the disenfranchisement felt by many Māori. But in te reo Māori, ‘nō’ means ‘belonging to’ and ‘one’ means ‘clay, sand, rock’. I belong to the earth. I am tangata whenua.
Rory Patterson Stalker 2021 laser-cut gold foam, fibreboard, acrylic paint, remnants of digital recording devices I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, … while metaphor is an … image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. — Andrei Tarkovsky
Patterson’s architectural model re-presents the ‘Zone’ in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, where our normative understanding of reality is decayed, redacted and irrelevant. In the film, three characters – representing the creative, rational and spiritual sides of the self – take a non-linear journey, each playing a role at unique locations. The model represents our own three sides of ‘self’ metaphorically coming together in a 3-dimensional field.
BIOGRAPHIES Connor Aislabie began his master’s thesis in Professor Daniel K Brown’s ‘Narrative Architecture’ stream in 2020, completing his MArch (Prof) degree in 2021. He is currently a free-lance designer specialising in 3D printing and modelling. Hamish Beattie-Craven was born in Australia and emigrated to New Zealand in 1992. He began his master’s thesis in Brown’s ‘Narrative Architecture’ stream in 2014, completing his MArch (Prof) degree in 2015 and his PhD under Brown’s co-supervision in 2020. Beattie-Craven was a finalist in the 2014 NZIA Graphisoft Student Design competition and a recipient of the 2016 Freemason’s Scholarship and Victoria Doctoral Scholarship. Beattie-Craven is currently the director of HeardSpace, engaging communities in citymaking through playing games, and he also works for Mcindoe Urban in Wellington. Alice Charles undertook her master’s thesis in Brown’s ‘Narrative Architecture’ stream from 2019 to 2021, and she completed her MArch (Prof) degree in 2021. Charles’s work was featured in the August 2021 special edition of AD [Architectural Design]: Emerging Talents / Training Architects. She is currently working for Warren & Mahoney Architects in Auckland, before which she worked at Herriot Melhuish O’Neill in Wellington and undertook a two-month internship in London at MAKE Architects. Charles has a particular interest in projects with great public reach and impact. She has a passion for the creative process of generating strong design narratives that influence the experience of architecture and the role it plays in shaping place. Adam Clark (Ngāti Maniapoto and Ngāti Hauā) was awarded the Dr Rangi Metekingi Postgraduate Scholarship in 2020 and 2021. He is currently an MArch (Prof) student in Brown’s ‘Narrative Architecture’ stream, scheduled to complete his master’s thesis in February 2022. William du Toit began his master’s thesis in Brown’s ‘Narrative Architecture’ stream in 2020, completing his MArch (Prof) degree in 2021. His thesis work was featured in the August 2021 special edition of AD [Architectural Design]: Emerging Talents / Training Architects. In February 2021, Humbugaa hosted a solo exhibition of du Toit’s work in Wellington at Whistling Sisters. He has a passion for residential architecture and currently works for foster+melville architects ltd in Wellington. Du Toit is continuing his free-lance drawing practice, intertwining it with his professional work to bridge the worlds of speculative design and real world architecture. Travis Hinchliff began his master’s thesis in Brown’s ‘Narrative Architecture’ stream in 2020, completing his Master of Interior Architecture (MIA) degree in 2021. He is now working for GHD Woodhead Creative Spaces in Wellington. Thomas Jackson is currently a postgraduate MArch (Prof) student in Brown’s ‘Narrative Architecture’ stream and is scheduled to complete his MArch (Prof) degree in February 2022. His thesis design films were selected to be shown at the 2021 Urban Screenings: Architectural Film Festival in Perth, Australia. Jonathan Morrish (Ngāti Ruanui) is a free-lance artist and designer. He began Brown’s ‘Narrative Architecture’ master’s stream in 2020 and completed his MArch (Prof) degree in 2021. Drawings from his thesis Tūrangawaewae | A Place to Stand were featured in the August 2021 special edition of AD [Architectural Design]: Emerging Talents / Training Architects. His drawing Haeata won the 2021 Tātuhi / Drawing Architecture: Sarah Treadwell Archive competition, and it received an Honourable Mention in the 2021 Kiingi Tuheitia Portraiture Award competition. May Myo Min was born in Burma, grew up in the Cook Islands, and emigrated to New Zealand in 2015. She began her master’s thesis in Brown’s ‘Narrative Architecture’ stream in 2019, completing her MArch (Prof) degree in 2020. Myo Min’s thesis work was featured in both the August 2021 special edition of AD [Architectural Design]: Emerging Talents / Training Architects as well as the 2021 edition of Asylum journal. In July 2020, Humbugaa hosted a solo exhibition of her work at Parsons Architects in Wellington. Myo Min now works for Makers of Architecture in Wellington. Rory Patterson is currently a postgraduate MArch (Prof) student in Brown’s ‘Narrative Architecture’ stream and is scheduled to complete his master’s thesis in February 2022. He has been working at MBIE during the 2021 pandemic, administering emergency allocations for New Zealand’s managed isolation facilities. Michael Weir was born in Australia and emigrated to New Zealand in 2004. He is currently a postgraduate MArch (Prof) student in Brown’s ‘Narrative Architecture’ stream and is scheduled to complete his MArch (Prof) degree in February 2022. He recently presented design research at the Ars Electronica 2021 Festival for Art, Technology & Society: A New Digital Deal. Ryan Western was born in Hong Kong, while his New Zealand-born parents were teaching in an international school there. Western began his master’s thesis in Brown’s ‘Narrative Architecture’ stream in 2019, completing his MArch (Prof) degree in 2020. His thesis work was featured in both the August 2021 special edition of AD [Architectural Design]: Emerging Talents / Training Architects as well as the 2021 edition of Asylum journal. In June 2020, Humbugaa hosted a solo exhibition of his work at Melling Architects in Wellington. Western was a finalist in the 2019 New Zealand Institute of Architects Student Design Awards and the 2017 Victoria University of Wellington Urban Design Competition. He is currently working for Novak+Middleton architects in Wellington. Nicholas Wilkey is a free-lance artist and designer. He was born in Bath, England and emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. Wilkey undertook Brown’s ‘Narrative Architecture’ master’s stream from 2019 to 2020. He is currently working for Mitchener Architecture and Design in Hawke’s Bay. In July 2019, Humbugaa hosted a solo exhibition of Wilkey’s thesis drawings at Laundry in Wellington, and Phantom Billstickers exhibited his drawings throughout Wellington as part of the Summer Street Art series. Wilkey’s thesis drawings were featured in the August 2021 special edition of AD [Architectural Design]: Emerging Talents / Training Architects, and editor Neil Spiller referred to Wilkey’s work as ‘a virtuoso lesson in the power of architectural drawing and speculation.’
Stamper battery photograph by William du Toit