Make Sense: Sydney School of Architecture Catalogue 2020

se n Se ke Ma

2020

We acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional owners of the land on which the University of Sydney is built: the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay respect to the knowledge embedded forever within the Aboriginal Custodianship of Country.

Make Sense 2020 © ISBN: 978-0-6484458-2-1 Published for ‘Make Sense’, The Sydney School of Architecture and Design (Virtual) Graduate Exhibition 2020.

First published in 2020 by Harvest: Fresh A Freerange Press imprint.

Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney Wilkinson Building 148 City Road University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Editors Kate Goodwin Adrian Thai Designer Adrian Thai © Make Sense 2020 This book, Make Sense, and all works depicted in it are © editors and contributors, 2020. All rights reserved.

The Graduate Exhibition was coordinated by the External Relations team (Steven Burns, Jay Marsh, Imogen Wetzell Ramsey) and curated

by Kate Goodwin, supported by SDRS (Robert Dongas and Hamish Hendersen).

Graphic identity Gracie Grew

CONTENTS

Dean’s Welcome Editorial Master of Architecture Bachelor of Design in Architecture Bachelor of Architecture and Environments Honours Index Think Pieces Exhibitions, Symposiums and Intensives Student Excellence Sponsors

4 6 10 48 76 98 104 118 132 136

Dean’s Welcome

Robyn Dowling Dean, Sydney School of Architecture,

Making Sense, Expanding Place

Design and Planning

The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning sits proudly on Gadigal land, where Aboriginal people have taught, learnt and nurtured since time immemorial. In February 2020, the School welcomed its new students with activities on the site now known as Gadigal Green, once

emptied, homebases sparsely occupied, public lectures stopped.

Teaching, learning and nurturing continued however beyond Wilkinson. Staff and students few. In tardis-like fashion, the teaching and learning spaces of the Wilkinson Building expanded.

The School had a physical presence across all continents (perhaps not the Antarctic). Dining tables became fabrication spaces. Bedrooms became sites to design creative interfaces. Local parks presented design challenges to solve. Communities of students and teachers were built across time zones and vast distances.

Through the disruptions of 2020 the School’s commitment to educate students to contribute to inclusive and sustainable futures remained undiminished, fostering imaginative, compassionate and unconventional approaches. Academic staff across the disciplines asked students and each other to learn new ways of working and to develop creative responses to the challenges of a global pandemic. Our newly appointed Professors of Practice supported graduation cohorts across our

disruptions of 2020. And in making sense of our place, the School returns to the Wilkinson Building and Gadigal land as our graduating students move beyond these concrete walls and laptop screens, all the richer for the expanded spaces in which the School now dwells.

Editorial

Kate Goodwin Professor of Practice, Architecture

‘I stop and do nothing. Nothing Happens. I am thinking about nothing. I listen to the passing of time.

University of Sydney

This is time, familiar and intimate. We are taken by it. The rush of seconds, hours, years

Head of Architecture and Heinz Curator, Royal Academy of Arts, London

in water. Our being is being in time. Its solemn music nurtures us, opens the world to us, troubles us, frightens and lulls us. The universe unfolds into the future, dragged by time, and exists according to the order of time.’ Rovelli, Carlo, The Order of Time, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, (2018), p1

We generally believe that the passing of time is the one certainty in our lives. However, the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli in his book the Order of Time, draws upon philosophy, modern physics and his own speciality quantum gravity to unravel the universal construct of time, arriving at a place that asks whether we exist in time, or whether time exists in us.

Even without the physicist’s insights, our perception of time has recently been disturbed.

For some it has slowed with the suspension of daily rituals, such as going to work or university or seeing friends, while for others it has raced forward with the implementation of drastic new

for those represented within this catalogue, the completion of a degree, which they had long been How do we, will we, personally and collectively make sense of these times? Thoughts from a student and academics are contained in this catalogue and accompany a selection of and creativity. When considering the future in a world that has been unsettled, an architectural education is arguably vital grounding as it teaches critical thinking and problem solving, and strengthens practical and logistical reasoning while cultivating the imagination. What will we do with these skills to harness opportunities to rebuild a better, more equitable world?

We have a moment to pause, to listen to the passing of time, to the rhythm of life. Architecture is the vessel through which we become aware of the passing of time; it provides evidence of past

peoples and cultures, and with a future we want to create.

Never Have (We) Ever

Dagmar Reinhardt Head of Architecture

Deeply rooted within architectural design, critical discourse and the practice of architecture reside our means of communication for exchanges, collaborations, learning, world-making, and inventing potential futures. Communication with clients, with builders and councils, with consulting partners, between same-team members, in multidisciplinary exchanges. The training grounds of academia and architectural education act as a preparation for practice.

2020 has been a challenging year for the architectural academic community; for students, academics and staff who have been massively impacted by the disruptions and changes brought on by Covid-19. In 2020, we have been socially distanced, contactless, online, without face-toface time. We have walked through empty lecture halls, classrooms and corridors in our teaching facilities. More importantly though, throughout this last year we have learned to invent, adapt, update, and deploy modes of communication radically different from the formats that we have used in architectural education for decades. 2020 has been a fast learning-curve of ‘Never have I ever’(s). Aligned with other social games such as ‘Truth or Dare’ and of the same provocative and activating potential, exchanges within the game structure of ‘Never have I ever’ provide for and encourage the communication of deep experiences, and individual and social learning. This year, within our locally and globally networked architectural community.

Never have we ever gathered around screens as our primary medium of exchange. In 2020 and within a span of two weeks, we had changed our weekly tutorial sessions in design studios, seminars and lab sessions from direct physical interaction to orchestrated and synchronised learning sessions with a maximum numbers of participants.

Never have we ever so widely shared conceptual ideas, precedents and references, bestpractice and demos. In studio sessions, we adopted direct links to research and references across design parameters and criteria with direct and immediate feedback in live sessions while sharing 3D models and scripts. Studio sessions often shifted from feedback to demonstration mode and vice versa, and enabled the wider sharing of individual views with the whole class.

Never have we ever had open access material, in the sense that the transmission of knowledge could be returned to, fast forwarded, spooled back, through recorded lectures and tutorial sessions that allow our students to listen in, take notes, return to points within their own learning speed and capacity.

Never have we ever multi-tasked to such an extent. With asynchronous lectures, active learning has been de-localised and de-timed, with knowledge available 24/7 and accessible from anywhere, and in support of student’s self-guided learning. Sketching over screenshares, or adopting Miro and Padlet, with ongoing chat instructions while on a Zoom call. With outreach from Uni or offsite, operating in public and wide open spaces as much as from the privacy of our rooms, we continued Never have we ever opened access to both local practitioners and representatives of our international network and partner universities. While taking into account not only global distances but, more importantly, time differences, we have produced lecture sequences scheduled between 8am and 7pm, offering students direct access in the Zoom Q&A, as well as alternative viewing times in recorded mode.

Never have we ever collaborated across such diverse media and large networks of expertise during a studio feedback session or a design critique. In fully online or combined hybrid mode, we have seen pre-recorded video presentations coupled with in-class direct feedback. We have seen valuable critique presented in person, with peer-to-peer feedback between students and groups in parallel chatlines. Recorded sessions have allowed our students to retrace important information Never have we ever in our architectural education been so demonstrably and successfully adaptive to change. Covid-19 has enlargened our bandwidth of communication in methods, thinking and applications. Our wold has simultaneously become both more localised and more and framework for navigating the path for the 2021 year ahead. building stone in the education of our graduating students. And now we release our graduates into they will master their new life with the inventiveness and elegance with which they have mastered this year.

We wish our 2020 graduate students success in their future careers.

MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE

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Master of Architecture

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MARC5001 Graduation Studio Semester 1 and Semester 2, 2020

Like Never Before Chris L Smith Paolo Stracchi

Semester 1 Coordinator François Blanciak Tutors François Blanciak William McKee Timothy Williams Semester 2 Coordinator Chris L Smith Tutors Qianyi Lim Chris L Smith Lee Stickells Paolo Stracchi Michael Tawa

pianists, Keith Jarrett, said that due to his health condition, he is unlikely to perform in public again.

He leaves us with half a century of incredible music and one of the most unforgettable lessons for life: the 1975 Köln Concert. In January 1975, after an exhausting drive from Zurich, Jarrett arrived in Köln with backaches after a few sleepless nights. He realised that the piano was smaller than the one he needed (and had requested); it was in very poor condition, even out of tune, and meant only for rehearsals. Understandably, he refused to play. Only the 17-year-old concert promoter, Vera Brandes, was able to convince him to stay and perform. The piano was eventually tuned, but it was too small for the fully booked opera house. At 23.30, Jarrett started playing on that little piano but knew he had to put much more energy and passion so that the music was loud enough to reach the whole audience. He played as he’d never played before. The recording of that one-hour concert

piano we asked for and the way there was longer than expected. Predictions are invariably wrong.

But this is when our passion and creativity must step in. This is the moment when, if you have something to say, you say it, loud and clear. In this strange 2020, we all adapted and changed. New modes of teaching and study needed to be put in place, quickly and effectively. We could not give up. And we are very proud to say that we did it, and even prouder to say that we did it together. This was not a solo piano concert but a choral effort. changes in the modes of operation necessitated by the global pandemic, but a year where we were gearing up for the forthcoming implementation of a new Master of Architecture. architecture’. It is a historical fact, but the phrase can perhaps hide another fact… that the School In 2021 we are proud to be launching our new MArch with two simple aims. Firstly, to ensure we deliver the most cutting-edge and intellectually rigorous education. Secondly, to exemplify the unique character of the course and the Sydney School internationally. We sum this character up in the phrases: we are experimental; we are critical; we are engaged. Via these three loci we advance research and teaching across the constructed environment. There is a constant relay between conceptual engagements and that which is learned from the cultures of architecture and urbanism to critically reframe knowledge and action. It is an obligation of the program to extend the boundaries and critical edges of the profession.

In anticipation we offered eight different design briefs in Graduation Studios 2020; these were eight opportunities to depart from, to explore and to experiment with Architecture, demonstrated through the great variety of work.

2021 will be a year of high expectation and much excitement. And though the future is always unpredictable, the lesson of 2020 was what that no matter what comes our way the solution is to stay together, make the most of circumstance, be creative and play on!

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Master of Architecture Semester 1, 2020

Programmatic Sculpture IV Franรงois Blanciak

This studio focuses on one pure form as a basis for research and design dimensions (H=120m; R=45m). Students, following a thorough analysis of a given site located in Darling Harbour, are asked to determine their own design program. While imposing a strong morphological constraint, the brief leaves students with a high degree of freedom in the interpretation of this formal theme.

the logical result of a linear design operation that involves the addition of these two initial given values (program plus site equals form). This traditional sequence is here inverted: site and form are the only given conditions from the beginning, and the program is to be determined The design work then consists in adapting the original form of the cylinder to its given site and chosen program, in a process that can be referred to as an act of programmatic sculpture.

Tutor: François Blanciak

Felicity May, ‘Losing Our Religion’. Modern architecture, like the modern world, has distanced itself from the sacred. Productivity and technological developments, conditions of the turbocharged economy, have become the dominant spirit of the age. The sacred has been modern cities. To experience something as sacred is to experience a moment of transcendence, a suspension of the everyday. Yet within the profanity of our urban environments, what sense can someone

space for public use, regardless of religion or spirituality. Establishing the ground for translating the notion of neutral and generic sacred space into built form. An investigation into the possibility of non-denominational sacred space for the practice of secular liturgy.

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(L) Ben Tang, ‘Sydney Medical Distribution Centre’. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sydney was required to be in lockdown. This advancements like drones and machinery could help those with medical needs, with reduced to no human contact. The idea of the Tumbalong Park site began with close connections to 15 local and global pharmaceutical companies, which create the distribution process. Post pandemic, chronic illnesses are growing and as such, drone deliveries of convenience, faster turnaround times, less congestion on roads and the ability to provide more services without requiring more drivers.

(R) Alvin Hui, ‘Darling Harbour Marine Sanctuary’. Darling Harbour’s

industrial past has resulted in decades of pollution seeping into the delicate ecosystems within Sydney Harbour. ‘The Marine Sanctuary’, located near the former industrial shoreline, functions to improve the source of food for the marine life. The intention is to implement stages of rehabilitation spanning three decades, that will slowly restore the Simultaneously, the Marine Sanctuary connects to the tourism-driven whilst also being educated on the effects of pollution on the harbour’s

Tutor: Franรงois Blanciak

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Master of Architecture Semester 1, 2020

Housing • House • Home William McKee

As we moved into a new decade; complex, urgent and massive questions loomed. I invited our students as young spatial practitioners to examine some of these questions through the lens of a residential development in our studio: Housing • House • Home.

Housing, House and Home are three words which all refer to the common human need of an environment in which to reside safely. We tried to think about how these words differ: Housing as both a noun

relationships.

Students developed their residential proposals on the site of the White Bay Power Station. This conspicuously derelict site in Sydney’s the questions we sought to examine. Through the development of masterplans, adaptations to the existing structure and articulation of domestic spaces, the students offered critical insight on topics such as augmented reality, globalism and community and the industrialisation of domestic daily habits.

Tutor: William McKee

Fatoumata Gologo, ‘More than Housing’. ‘Every city has pockets of underused and underutilised land or distressed and decaying urban areas. These pockets of underused land weaken a city’s image, livability, and its productivity. They are usually the result of changes in urban

of urban activation through generating a bottom-up framework involving the city residents in transforming the White Bay Power Station site. The a cooperative housing unit, urban agriculture unit, co-working spaces, fabrication spaces, local markets and pop-up restaurants.

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(L) Joel Lee, ‘Augmented Living’. Augmented reality is the future of space. Just like the traditional analog buttons on mobile phones, augmented reality will shift our life into the next dimension of how we

Instead of relinquishing one of the remaining pieces of the harbour in in order for it to become a source of energy that reinvigorates the

about the future of computing in our homes, and how we will be immersed in it in our living, explored through the lens of architecture and technology. (R) Rachelle Saleh, ‘House, Housing, Home’. Across

throughout their home is determined by their need to complete certain activities and revolves around a set layout of essential inlets and outlets.

buildings. White Bay Power Station sits vacant and full of potential.

facilitate activity throughout the building.

Tutor: William McKee

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Master of Architecture Semester 1, 2020

Infratecture: Infrastructure + Architecture Timothy Williams

A Centre for Caring for Country Sydney Water’s Upper Canal is a civil engineering marvel. It was completed in 1888 to bring water from the Nepean river system to Sydney as the metropolitan water supply was being rapidly exhausted.

It still conveys drinking water from Broughton Pass Weir to Prospect Reservoir and onto Sydneysiders. Water, our most precious resource, has never been more critical to a rapidly expanding metropolis in these times Broughton Pass was the site of the Appin Massacre and Prospect the Aboriginal people. The path of the canal runs through the emerging Aerotropolis, on the land of the Darug and Darawal people who lived with How can we learn from the land management practices of pre-1788 peoples and care for Country in a metropolitan context? Students were asked to explore this question by re-using post-1788 water infrastructure as sites of a Centre for Caring for Country.

Tutor: Timothy Williams

Natalie Matthews, ‘Dharawal Community Centre’. Dharawal land has always been a meeting place. The Centre respectfully continues this tradition, providing a space for knowledge sharing, caring for country, guided walks, arts and culture. Located at Broughtons Pass, the site is constrained by rivers cutting deep into the sandstone. The existing weir and waterworks form part of the Upper Nepean System. Rich in plant, animal and fungus species the area is also rich in aboriginal cultural sites,

sits on a platform with views to the Water Memorial. Operability allows for seasonal connection, making visitors aware of their environment and depriving them of high-tech comforts. It allows for simultaneous functions, creating a minimal footprint. Construction allows for reuse Muringong people who lost their lives in the Appin Massacre.

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(L) Elise Vanden Dool, ‘Canal Country’. ‘Canal Country’ is a new community masterplan template for the Upper Canal. Based on the indigenous concepts of caring for country, it provides a more sensitive, adaptable and vibrant alternative to the rising amount of generic housing estates in south-western Sydney. The masterplan template is based on a hexagonal grid to create an interconnected mixture of elements, reminiscent of the patchwork approach to indigenous land management.

These components can be adapted to the conditions of each site to create a dense and self-sustaining community. This design sees the potential for new communities to be centred along the 54km long Upper Canal, proposed as a public transport corridor. Prospect Reservoir, at the end of the canal system, is the location for the ‘Canal Country’ display

(R) Lillian Xiao, ‘Water Story’. Analysis of the Upper Canal water infrastructure and land management practices of Indigenous Australians inspired questions about how relationships between people, water and nature can assist in caring for country. The concept of ‘Water Story’ is

sedimentation, and disinfection. The built system consists of stormwater become part of the water cycle. .

Tutor: Timothy Williams

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Master of Architecture Semester 2, 2020

Hall to Hubbub Qianyi Lim

order, strength and status. For centuries, these imposing architectural landmarks have provided spaces for civic duty, public ceremony and other activities which uphold the democratic processes that govern the city.

While the hall has stood, unchanged, societal and technological change has accelerated at pace. The systems that our society operates under continue to evolve with the future of work, social exchange and political ideologies looking increasingly uncertain. Further, immediate pressures arising from the pandemic bring into question our modes of social interaction and their implications for public space.

In this climate of change, what role does the town hall play as a hub for the people? How can this typology be re-thought to foster community, innovation, and social exchange in an increasingly uncertain and polarised world? hub of innovation, exploring the potential for all citizens to determine the future of their city through participation and production by investigating precedents in practice. civic square directly opposite the Sydney Town Hall. Located along the main axis of George St, the site has seen considerable change, and the studio addresses its immediate and long-term future, challenging the existing fabric of the building and making a greater urban proposition.

Tutor: Qianyi Lim

Yumeng Zhang, ‘Plaza with Collision’. The design for Town Hall and New Civic Square brings the concept of collision into existing urban settings with an integrated grid system that expresses the spatial experience of urban history. Inspired by Lilian Steiner, an innovator who encourages the intersection and collision between different artists, audiences and knowledge to generate creative performances, the design combines

the tectonic city grid system with an existing urban fabric and the Tank Stream. Through intertwining these elements, ‘Plaza with Collision’ generates a collision of people in a performative setting. With various is enriched, showcasing everyday people as performers.

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(L) Ellie Chesterman, ‘Biosphere’. ‘Biosphere’ occupies the site of Sydney Town Hall, aiming to reconnect humans with the environment that surrounds us through a digital and physical experience. With disease

(R) Cassandra Nicomede, ‘Assembly’. ‘Assembly’ is a space where productive and participatory exchange occurs between people based on the cooperative use of public space and creative facilities. Sitting at the heart of our city, this is an exuberant exercise in architecture for

amongst people, the site houses three biomes carrying medicinal plants anxieties. The site also houses a wellness centre, in which the trial of medicinal hallucinogenics takes place under controlled circumstances.

Within Town Hall itself is a medical laboratory which conducts research and testing into the creation of medicinal substances. During the evening, art mapping and interactive virtual reality experiences.

contemplating the role civic typologies have on our current modes of social exchange and creativity, as well as the direct lack of spatial opportunities the city offers in terms of truly public and open space, as well as spaces that foster the diversity of the social and artistic patterns of people, technology and their innovations.

Tutor: Qianyi Lim

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Master of Architecture Semester 2, 2020

BodyBioBank Chris L Smith

In Dialogues II (1977) with Claire Parnet, Gilles Deleuze addresses the assembled nature of things and the manners by which different types of in terms of a ‘deepest sympathy’.1 The philosopher describes sympathy as ‘not a vague feeling of respect’ but rather as ‘bodies who love or hate each other, each time with populations in play, in these bodies or on these bodies.’2 literature, the same may be true of architecture and its relation with bodies, and bodies and their relation with organs and organs with cells, etc. Architects have, noticed the manner by which disparate elements are brought together: people, desires, concrete and timber, concepts, volumes, landscapes, choreographies and ceramics. These are all made to cohere in the architectural proposition. Medics too have noticed similarly complex relations between the disparate elements that come to constitute the body. assembles and the resonance of the architectural assemblage with bodily assemblages. The focus is a biobank (or ‘biorepository’) for the collection/collation/storage of biological materials harvested from populations, bodies and organs.3 state’s 48th biobank on a site close to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital’s Anatomical Pathology Unit. Despite there being so many biobanks spread over the planet, the architecture of this typology is as yet

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Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 51.

2

Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 52.

Tutor: Chris L Smith

Zarah Baitz and Kiara Carroll, ‘Sutura’. As human beings, we seek to maintain a sense of balance within our sense of selves. Throughout ‘norms’. When one’s sense of self is questioned, we are temporarily removed from our homely place of comfort and drawn towards the ‘uncanny’. Repressed feelings and thoughts surface and are empowered

in a place of dissonance, rawly unguarded, and exposed. ‘Sutura’, a BodyBioBank neighbouring Sydney’s RPA Hospital, stores biological samples for use in medical research. Sutura’s overall form speaks to the language of a suture, torn apart to expose raw layers of dermis, tissue, and membranes deep beneath the skin.

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(L) Sophia Tsang, ‘Present Revisit’. Biobank has always been hidden at our side. From womb to tomb, we store things in different material and scales. These little pieces of our bodies last across the ages, and various civilisations. The motionless specimen sometimes tells an ethnic history, or hold nostalgia or even shoulder the heavy responsibility of and timelessness. While work and values related to life and death have altered, a constant belief, a need for spiritual sustenance, creates bonds to each other across time. This fundamental thread will lead us to the future and continue long after we perish. (R) Jackson Birrell, ‘Dissolution’.

positions for a bio-repository that suspends organic matter spatiotemporally on a site composed of divergent programs and architectural styles. It is based on a reading of George Bataille’s eroticism, where transgression exposes one to the corporeal reality beneath aestheticised through a series of divergent programs organised by the transverse grids of St John’s College and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Mixed-use pavilions Bio Repository operations below. At its monumental heart, crematory and funerary space converge. As the many occupy all the programs of

Tutor: Chris L Smith

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Master of Architecture Semester 2, 2020

How Will We Live Together?

Lee Stickells

legible through designed political and economic formations, and networks on space, culture, and community. In doing so, we took up the theme of the postponed Biennale Architettura 2020 curator’s statement notes that the question ‘is at once an ancient one and an urgent one … Every generation asks it and answers it differently.’

Ironically, in the present moment of time, the very conditions of the pandemic that forced the biennale’s delay have made the question even more pressing. of the Green Square urban renewal area. Over the next few decades, the 278-hectare Green Square redevelopment will easily become the most densely populated part of Australia. We treated Green Square as a

Tutor: Lee Stickells

Evan Langendorfer, ‘Housing Derailed’. The year is 2040, and the City of Melbourne has found itself without key workers. Over the past decades, residents were forced to sprawl further from the city centre as affordable housing became increasingly elusive. Now, unable to operate, the city

affordability typology and method for housing can occur. By claiming the air rights to select portions of the VicTrack railway system, the

Derailed’ suggests that by altering landscapes and mindsets a new

that reconnect residents with the community, nature, and the city.

the employment of a modular hybrid-mat typology. Each unit offers the

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(L) Ka Hui Lim, ‘Project Verbena’. become the new normal, producing more and more climate refugees The survivors have struggled to put their lives back together, with the complicated and lengthy process of applying for government aid and bursaries worsening the problem. ‘Verbena’ is an oasis of healing for the victims can take refuge in this garden of sanctuary while rediscovering new agency. Different healing programs and assistance will be provided

(R) Wesley Fong, ‘Project EDEN’. In the year 2040, the world is gripped by an energy crisis and global warming, causing widespread social problems and economic stagnation. Society has moved indoors due to the advancement in technology and innovative distribution networks of merchandise and services. The usual nods of ‘Hello’ and ‘Good day’ proposes the services of a parametrically designed script that produces a residential tower typology with a gardening and biomass exchange scheme that aims to bring the individual out of isolation and back into their community via architectural spaces that subtlety instigate interactions.

Tutor: Lee Stickells

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Master of Architecture Semester 2, 2020

50/Fifty: The Post-Pandemic Sydney CBD Paolo Stracchi

As Christopher Alexander observed, ‘No building is ever perfect. Each

buildings differently from the way they thought they would.’

50/Fifty explores the experimental retelling of some of Sydney CBD’s buildings in the post-pandemic world. Grounded in this retelling the architecture of our buildings. Therefore architecture is constantly affected by the incessant and unpredictable events that occur during any building’s life. In the past few months, we have seen the endlessly

we to do with these semi-abandoned structures?

The re-imagination task asks students to deal with the history and cultural values of these buildings, but, above all, to decide how new operative life for these buildings but to explore unconventional architectural-spatial situations through uncovering an alternative image and use of a building in the obsolete city-centre. Finally, the studio brief investigates and questions the established notion of preservation and in but also to preserve it creatively.

Tutor: Paolo Stracchi

Jonathan Tong, ‘Sydney Improv Theatre’. Preservation isn’t frozen music. No work of art lasts forever. To preserve at ‘true present’ is not to rebuild or freeze the old fabric, it is an improvisation. It is an embrace of constant decay because the true present is made by continually creating something while it decays away. Sadly, most of the preservation works in Sydney have achieved the opposite. Restorations, reconstructions,

so-called ‘preservation’ works have merely remade fabric from a different time, a futile mimicry of something that is never meant to be in present time. There is an ever urgent call for an architectural demonstration to the rest of the city that showcases how preservation at true present

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(L) Lewis Dostine, ‘Off the (Curtain) Wall: Preservation of an adulterated innovation’. ‘Off the (Curtain) Wall’ is the result of a critical provides a possible prototype to preserve and retell its story within the context of a post-pandemic world. These discussions conclude around the protagonist, ‘Berger House’, a commercial building within Sydney’s CBD. It was originally permitted as a residential tower with “smart open batten sunshades above all windows and a high-style multiple arch

(R) Catherine Bauer, ‘Sydney Port 2170’. The concept of a blank canvas in architecture is no longer a starting point from which buildings that are excessive inventory of buildings is increasingly and irreversibly damaging our planet. ‘Sydney Port 2170’ offers a glimpse into the extreme ways in which our existing buildings may have to be adapted for future scenarios. building at 1 Martin Place transforms the building into a central port and fresh water supply system. The piled sandstone walls act as a fortress against the ocean swell now able to permeate the harbour. Within the

described in the March 1954 edition of Cross-Section is “now stripped for from the tectonic geometries of the Gothic facade. elevations of Australian city buildings”.

Tutor: Paolo Stracchi

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Master of Architecture Semester 2, 2020

Imagining Kafka’s Castle Michael Tawa

Mask of Medusa: works, 1947-1983

Das Schloß

Das Schloß

mood

atmosphere

Das Schloß In the Penal Colony The Great Wall of China, The Trial Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature Das Schloß The Trial Last Year at Marienbad

Tutor: Michael Tawa

Blake Davis, ‘Kafka’s Parsifal’.

The Castle

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

The Castle

The Castle Kafka’s K is a character

Tutor: Michael Tawa

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Catherine Bauer Joshua Cai Jane Chan

Jennifer Tran

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Semester 1

Semester 2 PhD Candidate University of Technology Sydney University of Sydney Dharawal elder/Environmentalist Australian National University/Author Royal Academy of Arts London/University of Sydney Government Architect NSW/University of Sydney Infrastructure NSW Lacoste + Stevenson Sydney Catchment Authority Sibling Architecture/University of Sydney

R-Urban/University of East London Architect John Fleming Architects REAL Foundation/Real Review Simpson Wilson Architects/Adjunct Professor University of New South Wales University of Sydney

University of Sydney Sibling Architecture Sibling Architecture University of New South Wales Cox Architecture Sibling Architecture Andrew Burges Architects Bates Smart University of Sydney Royal Academy of Arts London/University of Sydney Government Architect NSW/University of Sydney University of Sydney Jennifer McMaster, Trias Studio University of Sydney Sibling Architecture Artist University of Sydney REALM Studios University of Queensland Studio Trobec Cox Architecture SANAA Architects

BACHELOR OF DESIGN IN ARCHITECTURE

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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Semester 2, 2020

Investigating Utzon Catherine Lassen

Tutors

reproduce

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Tutor: Sean Akahane-Bryen

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Tutor: Justine Anderson

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Tutor: Jason Dibbs

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Tutor: Luke Hannaford

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Tutor: Catherine Lassen

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Tutor: Tiffany Liew

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Theory of the DĂŠrive

Tutor: Mahroo Moosavi

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Tutor: Mano Ponnambalam

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Tutor: Lachlan Seegers

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Tutor: Thomas Stromberg

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Tutor: Michael Tawa

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Siar Ata Xi Chen

Xiehao Jin Cam Mai Anna Ke Emma Maree Smith

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Cox Architecture University of Sydney Bennett + Trimble Architects Andrew Burns Architecture City of Sydney Matt Chan, Scale Architecture Grimshaw Architects Smart Design Studio Sam Crawford Architects University of Technology Sydney Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects BDES Arch graduate University of Sydney Royal Academy of Arts London/University of Sydney Johnson Pilton Walker Architects Researcher Monash University PhD graduate University of Sydney Eoghan Lewis Architects/Sydney Architecture Walks Lockhart-Krause Architects University of Newcastle University of Sydney University of Sydney CHROFI Great North Design Services Studioplusthree University of Sydney BDES Arch graduate University of Sydney BDES Arch graduate University of Sydney Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects

BACHELOR OF ARCHITECTURE AND ENVIRONMENTS

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Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

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Semester 2, 2020

Sydney Oral History Project (Library and/or Civic Space, Prototype or System) Matthew Mindrup

Tutors

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Urban Identities Cristina Aranzubia

Rule Based Design & Material Systems Eduardo de Oliveira Barata

Critical Connections in Stories and Sustainability Malay Dave

Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

Stranger Than Fiction (Listening to the City) Olivia Hyde and Kate Rintoul

In this studio, we began building a project from stories – the real stories of real people who have lived or still live in our city. We used words, models and drawings to explore how urban design and architecture can respond to and derive from our collective and individual lived experience. Students used the stories as a lens through which to critically evaluate our urban environment. They explored changing social, technological, environmental and cultural norms and questioned the role of the urban environment in shaping and evolving those norms. We asked: Who decides whose stories are heard and responded to? How do we honour memory and stories of place as our cities and diverse requirements?

Students chose from three different modes of urban scale practice – the prototype, experimentation and evaluation, students have worked to tell a story of the future, from stories of the past.

Haptic Encounters in Memory and Forgetting Matthew Mindrup

The Map Is Not the Territory Thomas Stromberg

In this tutorial, students were presented with a unique opportunity for completing their undergraduate studies in the BAE through a study of the haptic environments in architecture.

Before the written word, storytelling was an important method for preserving and passing on historical events from one generation to the next. The earliest forms of storytelling were presented orally utilising gestures, paintings, and location to help the storyteller remember and describe important elements of a story. We experience similar prompts in architecture through the acoustic, olfactory or luminous qualities of a place. Unlike déjà vu, these experiences are not anomalies of memory but prompts in which the identity of a place or thing is temporarily forgotten, and the memory is made present.

This tutorial began by forgetting the identities of the haptic encounters on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour as inspiration for designing memorable prompts in generating the design for a Sydney Oral History Library.

This studio revolved around two creative processes in architecture, namely ‘site mapping’ and ‘narrative’. Site mapping, as a process-oriented design methodology, employs a range of diagrammatic abstractions to undermine preconceived ideas and instead strategically expose deeper, not immediately visible, layers of meaning. Both orchestrated and serendipitous opportunities continuously presented themselves, making the design process a self-perpetuating oscillation between discovery and intent.

The narrative process embeds the architectural product within the framework of the site mapping by extending and weaving themes developed in the site mapping into the circulatory and spatial properties of the design. Collisions, fractures, intersections, voids and interstitial spaces are all examples of properties (both historical and theoretical as well as circulatory and spatial) that were extended from the context and through the conceptual and physical fabric of the design itself, providing the core narrative of the proposal.

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(L) Josh Jerome, ‘Rushcutters Auditory Deposit’. Designed to be an expansive public exhibition space for Sydney’s recorded oral histories, ‘Rushcutters Auditory Deposit’ is built around the belief that curation creates experiential value, not a museum’s particular artefacts.

Located at Sir David Martin Reserve, the building’s loose demarcation of spaces encapsulated by an undulating roof structure is a uniting force across the site. It acts as a vessel of knowledge through the utilisation of technologies to create an engaging digital experience in geographic space. The structure cascades into its harbourside boundary, promoting the integration of physical recreation and the dissemination of knowledge. Additionally, a reservoir forming the foreshore pathway uses the site for the collection of tidal energy. The Deposit both

sustainably responds to its urban context while its form challenges the public relationship with traditionally formal cultural spaces. (R) Yuqian Lin, ‘Ribbon of Senses’. Located in Sir David Martin Reserve, ‘Ribbon of Senses’ is a museum and exhibition space dedicated to immersive cultural and historic experiences. Surrounded by substantial semitransparent fabric blinds and innovative glass brick partition walls, visitors are able to sense the history and stories that are told here.

‘Ribbon of Senses’ is a collaboration of hardness and softness, light and shadow, broad and narrow, transparent and opaque, inside and outside.

It functions as a highlighted node in Sydney’s Harbour Walk and is designed to encourage passersby to stop, relax, linger and marvel at the great views towards Sydney’s skyline, harbour and parklands.

Tutor: Cristina Aranzubia

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(L) Howen Chang, ‘Discrete Aggregation’. Located on Cockatoo Island, in Sydney, the design aims to experiment with the idea of discrete units. Through the experimentation of rule-based aggregation using the Grasshopper plug-in Wasp, the design was created out of our control, expanding our ability as human beings to imagine what the composition of discrete units can do to transform our ability to create spaces. This unconventional approach leads us to think about innovative ways of space making. (R) Mohammad Abrar, ‘NSW Oral History Museum’.

A unique algorithmic system was used to piece together modular components of this museum. The principals of discrete architecture

were applied to cutdown construction costs and reduce complexity in the manufacturing and assembly process. The design features a unique arrangement of repeatable parts which join together to produce all architectural features of the museum. Powerful computational design requirements necessary for activities. Dense, close-knit arrangements of parts were designed to create audio rooms where visitors can have intimate experiences listening to moving audio pieces, whereas spaces like the exhibition halls require unobstructed roof spans and natural lighting. The design takes advantage of the aggregation tool’s ability to create cave-like nooks, as well as more open and spacious volumes.

Tutor: Eduardo de Oliveira Barata

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(L) Simone Carmody, ‘Storylines’. ‘Storylines’ is a gathering place for storytelling and education, providing a spatial realm for stories that are often purely auditory. This project is located on the northern slipway of Cockatoo Island – originally said to be a meeting place for Indigenous Australians of the Eora nation. The architectural framework ‘Designing with Country’ was explored to engage with Indigenous culture and heritage. Storytelling is central to Indigenous spirituality with Dreamtime stories being orally passed down over many generations. These storylines guide the organic form generation of the library, acting as a visual reminder of land to visitors, translating messages of sustainability and custodianship. The built form merges into the existing landscape, showcasing native biophilia and local materials. The physical intervention

of the library becomes a living part of the Cockatoo Island ecosystem rather than an interference to it. (R) Divya Kumar, ‘Myriad’. Located on Cockatoo Island in Sydney, ‘Myriad’, a Library for Oral Histories, aims to protect both occupants and the environment by providing inextricable links between humans and nature through a collection of framed views and unique experiences. These views are crafted by the scenery and changing light. It offers a range of spaces, each tailored to purpose, accommodating staff, guests and visitors alike. An intersection between existing culture and new ideas, the library utilises an array of siteresponsive strategies to promote user comfort and reduce environmental impacts.

Tutor: Malay Dave

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(L) Clare Banzon, ‘Leppington Landscape’. ’Leppington Landscape’ is a masterplan stemming from the oral histories of Marie Shehady, Meredith Adrien and Maureen Stapleton. These women described how they and the resulting loss of heritage and character in their neighbourhoods.

The project is a critical analysis of the plans for Leppington, asking ‘Whose stories are being prioritised to support the new development?’ My alternative masterplan proposes to start with the landscape, re-igniting the existing and latent stories that could otherwise be lost. I have sought to do this through re-distributing development to encourage active along the creeks and that allows the existing agricultural landscapes to be retained for the use and appreciation of all.

(R) Olive Freeman and Lucy Sternhall, ‘Shared Space’. ‘Reimagining Seagulls in Manly’ and ‘Shared Space’ are two projects that catalyse a shift in the perception of species dubbed as pests as a result of adaptions initiated by Human Induced Rapid Environmental Change (HIREC). Urbanisation has resulted in critical habitat loss and has ruptured the relationship between humans and native species. This project strives to rekindle this relationship, allowing for progression towards a harmonious urban ecological state, where active education and participation rebalance the negative impacts of HIREC on urban ecology. The project proposes incentivising and disincentivising solutions that aim to migrate Manly’s well documented Silver Gull ‘pest’ from problem areas towards spaces that have been adapted to best represent a sustainable, ecologically diverse environment for the species.

Tutor: Olivia Hyde

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(L) Coran Ho, ‘Culture by the River’. Through discovering the theme of exclusion and marginalisation from oral history, I realised the importance of creating a space to allow the unheard voices in the community to express their unique cultural experiences. Along Parramatta River, the public has free access to eight sites, varying in size, location and opportunities. Each site has a particular focus on a culture, allowing the community to showcase their stories and artworks. The ‘eel-shaped’ exhibition board was inspired by the rich Indigenous culture of the land.

Due to the versatile design of the ‘eel-shaped’ multi-functional stage at various sites, opportunities arise for concerts and community events.

All these elements work together to promote and celebrate each unique culture. (R) Eliza Williamson, ‘Abandoned Cokeworks Redevelopment’.

My Capstone Project aimed to capture the historical value of place

through creating an environment that blended the industrial site and natural landscape of the abandoned Coalcliff Cokeworks. The chosen site incorporated many constraints; including a lack of access due to the unique proximity of the Illawarra Escarpment, the existing structures impact on the surrounding bushland because of its cultural and social campground area has been proposed that will predominantly lie to the south end of the site. Initiatives have been introduced that will encourage visitors to use public transport to and from the site and, once at the site, limit their need to exit and enter the immediate grounds, limiting the impact the redevelopment will have on the surrounding suburbs.

Tutor: Kate Rintoul

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(L) Carla Alkhouri, ‘Sydney Oral History Library’. The design is derived from 37 planes lined up physically and metaphorically to represent the multiple layers of history and culture found in Sydney. The interior convey a labyrinthine concept as a means of adding to the haptic experience of the visitor. The planes extend beyond the windows to act as visual and solar shading. One of the main haptic encounters is experienced through an exposed atrium from the storytelling lookout above the exhibition space, in which sound is transferred to the exhibition, where stories are heard whilst looking at the associated art displayed, in addition to creating various lighting conditions throughout the year.

(R) Weiting Chen, ‘Time Capsule’. Located on Cockatoo Island, the Sydney Oral History Library is wedged between a cliff and an industrial warehouse. The site is long in the east-west direction, so the natural lighting condition of the space is affected by the sun position during the day. The design captures the changing sun position and projected shadows as the day progresses. The morning light well and afternoon storytelling spaces intend to celebrate different times of the day. Inspired by the city ‘Leonia’ from Invisible Cities by Calvino, the design rethinks the relationship between old and new, the occupied and unoccupied. As a highly interactive library, the slate wall on the side of the staircases and ramps will encourage visitors to write and to become part of history.

Tutor: Matthew Mindrup

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(L) Anastasia Kiaos, ‘Shrine to the Sky’. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have used the night sky as an educational instrument to aid oral Dreamtime and creation stories across generations. They rely on and to inform their customs and laws. The way Indigenous peoples

(R) Emily Jackson, ‘Through the Looking Glass’. Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know. Italo Calvino’s statement is present in Cockatoo Island’s landscape of contrasting historical buildings – manicured federation houses nestle against industrial warehouses, huge rusting steel structures tower over modern cafes. The eerie juxtaposition of these buildings abruptly violates visitors expectations, creating an

of humans’ innate tendency to look beyond their immediate uncertain creates an atmosphere that draws users to the sky and its beauty by strictly omitting the lateral scenery. The uncomprehensible scale of this structure and its verticality kindles a yearning to look upward with a speculative and reverent undertone. This project positions the sky as the ultimate educator and an enabler of imagination and self-examination.

contextual qualities with a spatial distribution derived from a model form that explores the idea of what lurks beneath the surface. At the heart of the design lies the concept that ‘a million individual cities complete the city’, in which the many unique and diverse moments felt within the tumbling structure are central to the whole library experience.

Tutor: Thomas Stromberg

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Bachelor of Architecture and Environments Matthew Mindrup

Cristina Aranzubia Leopold Balaz-issa Alvis Chan Jovana Hasham Josh Jerome Zhicheng Ji Joshua Kong David Lee Yuqian Lin Celine Louizos Jason Ma Thomas McMahon Kaitlyn Sandeman Georgia Stockwell Eduardo de Oliveira Barata Mohammad Abrar Elizabeth Cao Howen Chang Catherine Ding Arim Hwang Ben Hyslop Kathie Li Xiangyu Lu Lukie Peng Xinli Tang Yanwen Xie Helen Xiong Zhuo Yu Malay Dave Simon Bouwman Simone Carmody Sophie Durham Julia Farina Voegels Rachel Florey Cherry Kong Divya Kumar Xiaojun Lin Siqi Ma Sveva Patrizi Alex Ren Elvaretta Sentana Rachel Shen Christine Viray Deborah Wabasa Tingting Wang Jiaxuan Yan

Olivia Hyde Warda Ahmed Clare Banzon Guribadat Boparai Taylah Brito Abdullah Cheema Mitchell Delezio Sophia Dickerson Olive Freeman Richard Ibrahim Aman Kapoor Samuel Mason Madeleine Nicita Ramie Saleh Sreejit Sarbadhikari Lucy Sternhell Jo Zhao Matthew Mindrup Carla Alkhouri Elsie Chan Weiting Chen Michael Cuschieri Yifei Hu Jason Hwang Jiaxin Li Yue Lin Zihang Luo Liliane Nguyen Jasmine Phaktham Luke Ryan Christian Tsitsos Cameron Wang Xiaer Zhang Jingqiu Zhou Kate Rintoul Samantha Baxter Daniel Driscoll Coran Ho Kane Lee Kalinda Li Matteo Marti Tina Mitrevska Sheoti Morshed Shera Nathaly Villavicencio Ruhan Wang Kaveen Wickremaratchy Eliza Williamson Leyan Zhang Naomi Zhang Qian Zhang Yuqi Zhang

Thomas Stromberg Michael Calarco Jade Ewington Gordon Fung Camille Guyot Emily Jackson Erin Jenkins Chendu Jiang Tina Kartsounis Anastasia Kiaos Nada Lulic Dean Matheson Adelaide Neilson Stephanie Phu James Robertson Monika Sakal Michele Zhao

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External contributors and guest critics Sean Akahane-Bryen, University of Sydney Tooran Alizadeh, University of Sydney Justine Anderson, Sam Crawford Architect Chris Bamborough, PhD Candidate University of Technology Sydney Ines Benavente, Registered Architect COAM Ian Borg, Scott Carver Darlene Vander Breggen, Government Architect NSW Hiten Chavda, CEPT University Yen Dao, Lendlease Matthew Devine, Matthew Devine Architect/University of Sydney Anastasia Globa, University of Sydney Kate Goodwin, Royal Academy of Arts London/University of Sydney Lee Hillam, Dunn Hillam Architects Jungsoo Kim, University of Sydney Qianyi Lim, Sibling Architecture/University of Sydney Zie Liu, Woods Bagot Sandra Lรถschke, University of Sydney Alex Matovic, Aeta Studio William McKee, Western Sydney University Dagmar Reinhardt, University of Sydney Chris Lockhart Smith, Ecodweller Isabelle Toland, Aileen Sage Architects Anir Upadhyay, University of New South Wales Diksha Vijapur, University of Sydney

HONOURS INDEX

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Theatre of the City Timothy Bauer

‘Theatre of City’ is a public outdoor amphitheatre. An open structure. A vehicle for events. A space to hold performances of diverse and everchanging kinds. The project recognises architecture’s ability and agency to bring something new to a place. Forming and re-forming place, landscapes, perspectives, as well as self. A point of orientation within the city, and a device of re-orientation for its people. The program of the theatre is expressed through the form of the building, both externally and internally. The project is an accumulation of both physical and thematic layers; the structure as the set, the void as the stage, and the city as the backdrop. The open theatre reserves a place for people to gather within a densely built location and highly populated area. A place to sit and observe. To move and to pause. To watch people passing by.

Honours Index

Australia Square’s Extro-Version Owen Olthof

Harry Seidler and Pier Luigi Nervi worked collaboratively to deliver Australia Square. Concerns around the current state of the densifying city centre and creation of cavernous spaces were at the forefront of their minds when designing the space. To combat these concerns, they developed a slender yet tall cylindrical tower. The development freed the ground plane to become a porous offering to the city and a move away from the growing introversion of the typologies which began to dominate the cityscape. The development of Australia Square today looks to extend this gesture of porosity into the tower. By continuing the porosity and extroversion it will act as an attack on the growing introversion of the city, imploring others to do the same and integrate the public and to another one of Australia’s great pieces of heritage, the Great Barrier Reef. The reef has been answer to improving the porosity of Australia Square. It is a subtractive method in which organic material is expelled improving porosity in an attempt to cool and ventilate. A last gasp attempt to save the organism.

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ReCurating Gladesville Nicholas Bucci

recognised by the government, the site is considered a sombre reminder of patient suffering in a mental healthcare reform, underpinned by an aspiration for more humane conditions. Seeking to engage visitors with the duality of this history the proposal reframes the existing built and natural environment through the introduction of two interventions: a memorial to mentally ill patients, narratives through an architecture of timber and stone, the proposal invites us to consider the education and future reform.

Honours Index

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THINK PIECES

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Transmission Delay ‘Do you know what I mean, does it make sense?’

Buffering. Buffering. Buffering. Pixels blurring. Microphone warbling.

‘Yeah, I think so, but could you repeat that last bit again?’

Nick Woolley Master of Architecture student

Operating within a digital space is hardly new within architectural practice, but it’s hard to shake the feeling of the past year as anything other than a surreal out-of-body experience. Architecture without place? Not quite, but it certainly feels that way – architecture apart from many of the places we inhabit, the ground shifting beneath our feet. Even the word itself felt remote for a time, an echo of hastily vacated spaces. The experience of study without physically attending school alongside friends, peers and tutors encapsulates this strange separation, but for me it’s not education we’ve all had to undertake in parallel to our academic studies. In one abrupt movement, we’ve needed to recognise and subsequently adapt to an unusual kind of distance both between ourselves and our work, an in-between space framed by crucial lockdowns and essential physical isolation. A rift synonymous with endless Zoom meetings, phone calls and text exchanges – tools shortcoming, a lack of instantaneity. That nagging sense of not quite being present, of not quite heavily grounded in ideas of site, context, tectonics and tactility, how can we convey the immediacy of an architectural gesture across this digital and spatial divide? More broadly, as a discipline, how do we communicate to each other the unique experiential qualities of our practice when our connection to them has been fractured and interrupted?

Can we understand a space in the same way?

Hardly an easy predicament to navigate, nor are its problems exclusive to architecture. Across to theatre, performance and production design, similar experiences of this distance emerge. Even day-to-day interactions throughout the year have sometimes felt like holding a conversation in a tunnel, accompanied by a background echo that can’t quite be ignored. As if there’s a perceived signal delay between intent and understanding, accentuated by the intermittent pauses, buffering and static we encounter across our telecommunications media. Hovering at the margins, this gap can largely be attributed to a fracturing of the aura – those unique phenomenological effects developed through the interface between subjects, a simultaneous condensing of the qualities seminal text ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.1 We develop an instinctual response through direct interaction with a site, an architecture, or the combination of both, an

Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).

Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.

3 Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1966).

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sensory impression can’t be immediately replicated when we remove ourselves from these conditions – an aura relies intrinsically upon physical proximity and engagement, successively Conversely, as we craft our projects across semesters, they develop auras of their own which often change as their design object relationship, this quality is cultivated as we draw, model, talk, write and present, collaborating with fellow students, tutors, friends and family, until our designs establish their own identities.

Think Pieces

faculty. Lockdowns and their subsequent effects on remote learning and physical distancing have fractured not just our tangible access to site and architecture, but our face-to-face interaction with each other, placing any aura our works might produce in a precarious situation. We found ourselves enveloped by the vast digital array of networks and tools within which we’ve learnt to practice, yet have lacked the immediate feedback loop that informs their use. What may seem intuitive in person may not be as legible over Zoom, the transmission delay across digital networks manifesting concurrently as a gap of representation. Hence this degree of uncertainty during the collaborate or allow a project to speak for itself in the company of others, I found myself constantly able to make sense of it in isolation. While this transition could be frustrating in the moment, it seemed an appropriate challenge – siting architecture forms as much of a narrative as siting ourselves in relation to it, so learning how to express the qualities of both in their immediate absence would only be a useful exercise. Albeit not an easy one. In many ways, it was like revisiting testing out new graphic techniques, adopting different lexicons, reframing modes of expression to bridge this divide. Yes, there was no shortage of moments ‘lost in translation’, but akin to applying language in a new way, it became a rewarding, self-aware process of studying design from both outside-in and inside-out simultaneously. Formulating new strategies to communicate a sense of place within the placeless.

With any luck, we can continue to develop certain aspects of this turbulent period as Wilkinson emerges from its hibernation, perhaps with a far greater appreciation for face-to-face teaching and study after its prolonged absence, along with the potential of digital communications to enhance our new blended mode of learning. I’ve never been more grateful to share a piece of trace around a table! Rather than constrict our expression, this year’s collective experience offers us both in terms of our approach to design and its processes. We may now again be able to directly experience the respective auras of our works, but much like our representational resources, we ought to be wary of relying upon a single architectural communication tool – after all, they work far better in unison. If anything, a crucial element of this new-found resilience may be an acceptance of the space around come to recognise the ‘room’ surrounding it for varied understandings, informing the clarity of its resolution and expression – working internally and externally in one. Far from a pedagogy framed by interpretation, this shared educational process, with the capacity to grow and shrink accordingly, ‘is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than what it means.’3 A reframing of design agency in which could prove especially useful after the year that’s been.

Does it make sense?

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Post-Covid

Andrew Leach Associate Dean, Research

Part of the work done by historiography is to make sense of the messy entirety of the past. In this, it is always a work done by and for the present. Events could once be tied to the rules of kings, which in turn lend substance to apparently coherent periods of time; or to forces beyond individual power, including economics, social change, religion or other wide-ranging institutions. Architecture could also be made, by its historians, to have a consistency over time, or across a geography, that withstood scrutiny well enough. We’ve recently become more wary of that kind of bookending as a relic of privilege, which has forced us to reconsider how we locate ourselves in relation to the past, and relative to those whose pasts are at odds with any pasts we might reconstruct for ourselves.

How does the interplay of events and people shape what we can know as history?

The enduring task of the history of architecture is to understand what happened and why as new work or restore extant fabric; the technology available; the will of clients, or of a populus; the constraints imposed (or stimulations offered) by governments at all scales; the economic circumstances informing any given situation; the forces of fashion, media, and the circulation of ideas and precedents. Added to this are the paths and processes tracking from ideation to realisation; and the education informing how ideas and solutions tested elsewhere, and at other times, are brought into play. a complex collective experience—at the very least, of the sense of there being a before and after: , post-war, GFC-era … pre-Covid.

While these are in tension with (architectural) history’s older periodising terms—Hellenic, counter-reformation, Enlightenment, antebellum, Georgian, postmodern, etc—these terms

State Library of New South Wales.

Think Pieces

business. Something changed in the years around the outbreak of the First World War that drew attention to mobility, territory, gender roles and the operations of imperial powers. Things weren’t the same afterwards. Jean-Louis Cohen’s resistance to the blank space historians accord to the years separating the interwar and post-war decades of the mid-twentieth century has shown the There was a war-time architecture, and it was (is now) possible to be on the losing side of the practice that happened there.

The announcements made in November of this year of a series of relatively effective vaccines for the novel coronavirus Covid-19 raised the spectre of a return to ‘normal’ life, with projective months’ worth of speculation on the long-term effects of the experience of a global pandemic on What will Covid be for architecture? What will architecture be for the post-Covid age? More to the Part of the answer rests with how we have gone about our lives in the interregnum between pre and post. Globalisation has moved from a matter of physical mobility to perpetual digital to rest our appetite for unrestrained travel. Our connection to workplaces, institutions and public transport has become wary of risk; our sense of security (and hence sphere of movement) has been shaped by newly insistent national or state borders. We’ve been in our kitchens, we’ve been by ourselves, we’ve been with our families, we’ve been in the suburbs …

Any attempt to predict how architects and urban planners will in the coming years account

to make narratives out of pure complexity. Since the nineteenth century, architects have been more attuned to how history (or, rather, historiography) operates, such that the project of sorting out museum or the biennale or the monograph, and for which categories and the division of time have consequences for their critical legacy.

The greatest value of history for architecture, though, lies in its attempts to offer clarity over as a question of cycles or recurrences, but of where architecture looks for its authority, how it understands and activates its artistic, institutional or technological patrimony, where it meets real

neutralising the additional machinery inserted into the architectural fabric. It’s unlikely to end there.

There’s something to be said about the things we need to do now to understand the world that started to wrap up back in February as the end of some kind of chapter, and which will be caught will be architecture and an attempt to know the best thing to do. I can’t say we have any of the answers, but we’ll be watching to see what happens, trying to make sense of it.

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Architecture Amplified

Professors of Practice, Architecture University of Sydney

Kate Goodwin Head of Architecture and Heinz Curator, Royal Academy of Arts, London

Olivia Hyde Director of Design Excellence, Government Architect NSW

Qianyi Lim Director at Sibling Architecture

It is a delightful feeling to leave a dinner party, abuzz with energy and ideas, appreciating how carefully the host had thought about the mix of guests they brought together, with shared interests and synergies but also different experiences and perspectives. Drawn together by the University as the three new Professors of Practice, we have found ourselves many times lost in rich conversations, provoked by the School but equally the wider professional worlds in which we each work. We debate ideas and identify shared passions that fall into three broad and interdependent areas: the importance of public debate and engagement; the versatility, vitality and value of the During the week we were thinking about and then penning this piece, there was an unusual remark about bulldozing the White Bay power station. Public outrage followed, and then an article, also from the Treasurer, acknowledging that whilst he may have been in error about White Bay, he did have a hit list for the bulldozer, and giving us his top ten. The Minister for Planning followed, with a list of buildings he’d keep, AIA presidents past and present jumped in, along with Elizabeth This points to the fact that we all – to varying degrees – have an opinion about architecture. It follows that it should be a topic covered extensively in the papers and elsewhere, as it is an easy and important area about which to generate debate and sell news. So it is odd how little is usually Very early in our architectural education a spatial antenna is tuned that informs how we see the world. As architects we often forget that the rest of the populous does not necessarily look with the same critical eyes or appreciation of the places and spaces they inhabit daily. But there is enormous value in building greater public awareness, an awareness that can be cultivated through informed and lively debate and engagement with architecture that takes place across mainstream communities, better clients and the building of a culture of design – one in which we all understand we have a role to play. Too often architecture in this country can be viewed from the perspective of real estate, with a market, rather than with cultural or societal value. As architects we need to be active in enabling a shift away from this narrow and limiting view.

Architects are also strategic, critical and spatial thinkers that can and should play a role in distinct lack of architects and others with design skills and expertise in government and in the talks series: if role, while always and importantly centred on and growing from the complexity and richness of practice, must include that of the bureaucrat, the board member, the politician....

Think Pieces

One of the most valuable skills we cultivate as architects is an ability to bring people together – not only in the environments we create, but also through the process of creating them. Realising a building, landscape or masterplan, requires the clear direction and adept coordination of planners to engineers, heritage to environmental specialists, those with indigenous knowledge on connecting to Country, and those from the local communities and end users. Respecting their expertise is fundamental to a project’s success.

It does not stop there. Our practice may be further enriched when we look to other disciplines, widening our perspective on how the world is shaped. We could expand our abilities in deciphering markets. Likewise, we can learn from the creative and collaborative processes of artists, and from the technical and research driven methods of scientists. All of these lessons augment our skills as We must ask ourselves as architects where our responsibility lies. While our clients are of critical importance, they are often not the primary end users of the buildings or spaces we design, and in every project, even the private house, there is a public setting. Regardless of the project type or scale, surely we always have the responsibility to consider the wider context, from the street to This responsibility extends into the inner workings of an architectural practice, where a studio’s culture can be telling of its productive output. If our values are to create equitable and inclusive spaces for our diverse communities, then we need to espouse these same values within practice.

As business owners we should prioritise work-life balance, wage transparency and explore the potentials of collective business ownership. Creating a practice is a rewarding project in its Valuing the voices of others, we launched a series of conversations this year called . It brought together inspiring practitioners from around the world to collectively interrogate the role architects can play both as highly skilled designers of buildings as well as thought-leaders, advocates, activists, writers, researchers and critical, creative producers.

Sadie Morgan’s inspiring launch to the series highlighted that good design is everybody’s responsibility. That it should be an expectation and founding principle of everything we create, from national-scale infrastructure to small-scale public housing, and with the systems and expertise in place to support this. She advocated for architects to be visionary leaders who demonstrate what ‘good design’ looks like, but equally stressed the importance of balance in life and in work, in

The conversations have only just begun....

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The Place of Architecture in Politics Duanfang Lu Associate Dean, Research Education

Architecture, like painting and sculpture, is a making of substance into art. Unlike the latter, however, architecture is a making into a massive object in whose voids humans act and live.

As Lao Tzu wrote in his Tao Teh King Thirty spokes converge upon a single hub; It is on the hole in the center that the use of the car hinges.

We make a vessel from a lump of clay; It is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful.

We make doors and windows for a room; But it is these empty spaces that make the room livable.

Thus while the tangible has advantages; It is the intangible that makes it useful.1

Architectural space is “worlded”: it is inscribed with meanings and norms of a society, as well as the intentions of the client and the designer. In the arena of architecture, people vote by investment. Members of a certain community at a given time have shared social aspirations and client and the designer are embedded in this already-existing network of relations in time, what may appear idiosyncratic; they stretch the rules. Yet even such resistance is necessarily informed by a collective understanding of human existence and its dilemmas of the time. Societies may “world” their built environment differently, and that worldhood is nonessential and subjected to changes over time. Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey, for instance, has been re-worlded multiple Architectural space orders bodily activities and conditions the way human subjects experience

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey.

differentiated into a series of zones following a spatial hierarchy and sequence, through which activities and experiences are pre-programed. Certain activities are expected to take place at certain locations; to reach the latter one goes through a process of thresholding, proceeding, stopping, turning, and entering. Some zones are made more important, set in contrast to minor ones which both serve and prepare people for the former. Their form, size, height, light, shade, materiality, texture, decoration, tectonics, and the resulting overall atmosphere create varied sensual experiences for the body, suggesting what is valued and honored. This may involve more than one sensory modality, working on the body’s visual, olfactory, tactile, auditory, haptic, and proprioceptive systems. One’s sentiments may continue to shift during the progression of movements. Through these mechanisms, buildings (e.g., a Gothic cathedral and a neoclassical town hall) are programed differently not only to support distinct activities but also to enact different understandings of what humans are and should be.

Architecture is embedded in a system of tangible (surrounding buildings and neighborhoods, landscape, infrastructure, urban fabric, topography, ecology, etc.) and nontangible entities (ideologies, cultures, political systems, policies, regulations, knowledge production and transfer, etc.). Buildings occupy different levels of symbolic weightiness in this system where things are

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In ancient China, for example, many lived in courtyard houses whose layout embodied the hierarchical Confucian ethics. Scholars created gardens as a temporary escape from that world, following the Taoist philosophy of the man-nature relationship. Buddhist temples were often set away and high in mountains, near and far, this spatial system conditioned the working of different worldly forces, forming the unique existential constitution of the ancient Han Chinese.

People habitually use space transparently, which Heidegger would categorise as “ready-tohand.” In Division I of Being and Time way of being can be described without recourse to deliberate, self-referential consciousness, but rather as mindless everyday coping in the background of a shared understanding of being. He proposes that a human being must be understood “in what it does, uses, expects, avoids – in the environmentally ready-to-hand with which it is primarily concerned”.3 Being members of a certain community, we grow up in inscribed norms and practices. As a result, we deal with elements within does not need to consciously think of the stairs in order to climb them; one’s body naturally knows how to proceed due to one’s familiarity with it.

Here lies both the very danger and the very strength of architecture in terms of its place in politics. On the one hand, power relations often insinuated themselves in architectural space in such a way that people take them as a natural matter-of-fact rather than a contestable human construct. Take Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) account of the Kabyle house in Algeria as an example. The main door of the Kabyle house, to the east, is male, while opposite is the smaller female entrance.

The woman’s loom is placed against this west wall. The attached stable, a dark place associated with sex, death and birth, is a female space, while the higher, lighter, living space is associated with the nobility and honor of the patrilineal head of the household.4 Although the architectural space of the Kabyle house expresses and reinforces differentiated gender roles, it is experienced by locals as a way of being-in-the-world rather than an institutionally enforced patriarchal system.

On the other hand, it is also the very materiality that enables certain socio-spatial innovations to consolidate their concreteness in architectural space. The corridor is a case in point: the modern shape of our buildings came into being only as a consequence of the invention of the corridor in the seventeenth century. Before this, “a person used to negotiate by passing through a rat’s nest of other rooms and stepping over sleeping bodies”.6 in the modernist types of rooms it helped shape, but lies in a set of new social relationships that it generated, such as the notions of privacy and the nuclear family. It is through people’s shared,

Lao Tzu, (1961) Tao Teh Ching, translated by J.C.H. Wu. New York: St. John University.

The Eyes of the Skin. London: Wiley.

3 Being and Time.

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Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University

moments of social innovations into more durable ones, where new subjectivity is formed and human activities are re-ordered without further contestation.

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Jameson, Fredric (1997) “Is Space Political?” in Neil Leach (ed.) Rethinking Architecture. New 6

Excerpts from Duanfang Lu, ‘Architecture in the Age of Playfulness: Mapping a Framework for Global Historiography’, in Duanfang Lu (ed) The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History

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Object Oriented Ontology and the Challenge of the Corinthian Capital Simon Weir Lecturer in Architecture: Design Philosophy

recognisable objects in architectural history. Repeated with innumerable variations for more than two thousand years, this bizarre naturalistic object crept into a structure otherwise overwhelmed by geometry. Ambitious designers everywhere still ask: how can we design such enduringly alluring, idiosyncratic, irrational objects? architecture manifests a single coherent idea, a single guiding principle that steers all design decisions, from site planning to fabrication details. But what single idea accounts for both the proportional rigour of a classical temple and the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian capital?

Although the ‘single governing idea’ makes a strong rhetorical injunction in pedagogical processes, great works of architecture are not as simple as one idea – great works of architecture actively engage with a diverse set of forms and concepts. the origin of the Corinthian capital in a characteristically curious anecdote. The explanation is preluded with Vitruvius’ assertion that the proportions of columns were based on imitations of the proportions of human bodies, an obviously loose, but nonetheless highly memorable analogy. It is important here to not prematurely make an incautious turn and say that columns were based on were validated by association to a theory of the human body. Then, although the Doric and Ionic capitals receive no explanation at all, Vitruvius focussed on the Corinthian:

attacked by an illness and passed away. After her burial, her nurse, collecting a few little things which used to give the girl pleasure while she was alive, put them in a basket, carried it to the tomb, and laid it on top thereof, covering it with a roof-tile so that the things might last longer in the open air. This basket happened to be placed just above the root of an acanthus. The acanthus root, pressed down meanwhile though it was by the weight, when springtime came round put forth leaves and stalks in the middle, and the stalks, growing up along the sides of the basket, and pressed out by the corners of the tile through the compulsion of its weight, were forced to bend into volutes at the outer edges. Just then Callimachus… passed by this tomb and observed the basket with the tender young leaves growing round it. Delighted with the novel style and form, he built some columns after that pattern for the Corinthians.1

There are many reasons why the Corinthian capital would appeal to someone with sensibilities for surrealism and object oriented ontology, or OOO (“triple oh”). Freudian inspired surrealists might appreciate the morbid origin story where an anthropomorphic column is crowned with tomb decor, and the corresponding association of a plant growing out of a human body is the kind of disturbing hybrid one might expect from a dream. What is perhaps more interesting today are the objectobject relations, which emerge in the ecological thought of OOO. Object-Object Relations Tallinn Architecture Biennale, OOO’s most

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cosmos, human thought and everything else. Over here you have human thought, over here you have animals, plants, rocks, asteroids, stars… it’s based on the idea that human thought is the one really evident thing that we are able to make contact with directly because even if everything I thought was just an illusion, I would have to be thinking in order to be deluded.” The unapologetic human exceptionalism that has persisted in western philosophy over the last few centuries, aphorised in René Descartes’ “I think therefore I am,” and umbrellaed by Quentin Meillassoux’s term, correlationism, has been an enduring impediment to ecological thought.

Instead of prioritising human consciousness as the prime mover of causation, OOO, a where we say that everything is on the same footing at the beginning: human thought is one kind 3

Hence OOO is different from modern philosophy in that it takes seriously not only human-object relations, but also object-object relations wholly independent from human cognition.

The human exceptionalism that Descartes advanced, and OOO refutes, had positive ethical aspects separately. For Descartes humans occupied an unconscious world, and other animals were merely non-conscious mechanistic automata. This had profound consequences for ethics, whereby all people were equalised and afforded both rights and obligations corresponding to their conscious agency. This equality argued against the human slavery that both classical and religious ethical systems endorsed, or at least condoned. However, the non-human world was relegated to nothing more than a set of tools or obstacles for humanity. some aspect of the ethical domain. Rather than the modern anthropocentrism in which plants and animals are only valuable insofar as they are valuable to humanity, plants and animals are valuable in themselves. There are several strategies for depicting, representing or embodying the principle in architectural design. Since humans were afforded rights based on their conscious agency, one strategy is to perceptibly highlight or endow materials with the appearance of agency, or depict emotive relationships between objects. Hence one of the many diverse signatures in OOO design is non-human object-object relations, and hence a focus on objects’ qualities and less interest in designers’ personal narratives, as Mark Foster Gage, Associate Dean at the Yale School of Architecture, has explained, “OOO is offering my generation an opportunity to think about architecture based on its qualities not its associations.”4 The Challenge of the Corinthian Capital The unnamed precious goods the Corinthian nurse placed inside the basket and sealed with a tile are long lost, forever withdrawn. All that remains are the deformations of the acanthus leaves.

And for those of us who have never seen an acanthus plant, even the object-object relationship is absent. All that is left is a weird, alluring object.

The location of the Corinthian capital also suggests the possibility of another speculative occasionalism: the theory whereby contact (which includes perception) between “real objects” requires intermediary “sensual objects” to enact contact. In architecture, the column and lintel pairing

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Design prototype for a partition wall, EPS with robotic ruled-surface cuts, melted, painted and patinated, by Adrian Taylor and Simon Weir.

produces an object-of-contact where structural forces are transferred. In the language of OOO, this would be the location of “occasionalist tectonics”. With the “dialetheic” sleight-of-hand necessarily at the blurry core of OOO,6 the sensual object can be made real through the objectifying process of cognition. A column capital can thus be understood as the realisation of a sensual object-ofcontact, the materialisation of their relationship. Since the object-of-contact belongs to a different ontological category than the real objects it connects, it would be appropriate for an “occasionalist architecturalisation” to employ a different formal and conceptual language.7 When we ponder a contemporary Corinthian capital, we question the intermediary object, and how it is formally and conceptually different from the rest of the design, yet somehow strangely, unprecedentedly harmonious.

Botany is a wondrous exemplar of the aesthetic virtue of multiple formal languages, materialising formal diversity, and eschewing barren simplicity. Imagine you had never seen a

Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, Graham Harman, “14. Tallinn Architecture Biennale Symposium: Graham Harman. Why Architecture and Beauty Need Each Other” estarchitecture.

3 Graham Harman, “14. Tallinn Architecture Biennale Symposium: Graham Harman. Why Architecture and Beauty Need Each Other” estarchitecture.

4 Texas A&M College of Architecture, “Architects Patrik Schumacher and Mark Foster Gage face off”.

Harman, “On Vicarious Causation,” Collapse Volume II Harman, “Time, Space, Essence, and Eidos: a New Theory of causation,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 6, no. 1 1-17; Harman, “ Without Recompense,” Parallax 16, no. 1, The Quadruple Object 69-81 6 Simon Weir, “Art and Ontography.” Open Philosophy 7 Vitruvius called the Corinthian, the “venustiores” the most beautiful; beauty being one of architecture’s three principle virtues: Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, 4.1.8.

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of the hard, thorny bush will help you “draw forth” the delicate rose. Its different colour, different translucency, different texture, different fragrance, different form, and different purpose are directed not at humans but at bees. Though the rose is not for us, with our stories we make it about ourselves nonetheless. As enamoured by the bush’s hard, robust exterior as some may be, we accept, do we not, that the rose improves the thorny bush? Indeed, the addition of the rose is so beguiling that even the most gentle among us forgive the bush its rigid thorns, and are led invitation and aggressive resistance.

This is the problem we have been exploring in collective design experiments where hyperindividualistic objects are produced. Then in a second phase, we design interstitial connections between others’ objects, or superimpositions upon them, and like the rosebud that precedes the rose, include an aspect of retaining and subtly transforming each original. The process requires designers to engage constructively and productively with formal and conceptual diversity, and always results in objects more formally complex, and creatively satisfying, than their solo works.

The process also overcomes any individual’s charitable positivity towards their own work, and produces objects with an independence from their designers, giving the impression of the objects’ autonomy and object-object relations appear to emerge in the cultivated confusion.

So, designers, the OOO challenge of the Corinthian capital is to harmoniously add disjunctive for a new cultivar, merge iridescent cephalopod roofs onto glass museums, grow robotic corridors out of rustic hotels, and collide seventeenth century facade embellishments with authentic shipwrecks, to conjure the new grapes growing on new vines for new wines.

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Reef

Simon Twose Anastasia Globa Jules Moloney Lawrence Harvey

Tin Sheds Gallery

‘Reef’ is an experimental drawing installation that exists simultaneously in three overlapping dimensions: material space, virtual space and sound space. It is a sketch of a small section earthquake causing the submarine landscape to jolt upwards, and with it, the reef.

This project uses a hybrid of cast concrete miniature sketches, sound sketches and sketches in VR and AR to capture the ambiguous scale and strange presence of this landscape. Visitors to the gallery are immersed in a single spatial sketch, morphing from castings of the rock surface to gestural concrete sketches to digital interpretations.

Exhibitions, Symposiums and Intensives

Dhuwarr: A Celebration of Gomeroi Grasses, Grains and Placemaking Michael Mossman (Kuku Yalanji) Richard Lepastrier Jack Gillmer (Worimi, Biripi)

F23 Administration Building

Stories from Gamilaraay Country are the protagonists of ‘Dhuwarr: A Celebration of Gomeroi Grasses, Grains and Placemaking’. Through found artefacts, the act of grinding grains with water this dietary staple were Aboriginal people. ‘Dhuwarr’ is designed to showcase the importance of Australian native grasses in food production. Engineering practices to harvest endemic grasses for their grains spans across many generations, and today they are an integral part in passing down knowledge relating to Country. Sharing these important storylines will facilitate exchange of knowledge in contemporary ways, engendering new understanding for our future generations.

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Dhuwarr – Grasses and Grains Installation Michael Mossman Kuku Yalanji

Jack Gillmer Worimi Biripi

Country Country is a realm that exists all around us. For First Nations cultures of the Australian continent, a collective of hundreds of nation groups shared rich relationships with the earth, water and sky and all entities in-between. Living with Country requires deep understandings of place, its management, geography, climate and food sources, along with ways to pass on these understandings. Grasses are a key part of Country and in turn sustained life that thrived in these beautiful landscapes.

We recently commenced a placemaking project to celebrate Gomeroi cultural practices, whose stories of grasses and grains are the protagonist of an exciting installation. These ancient cultural practices form the narrative of life, sustenance, and the distinct task of bread-making through participatory reciprocal exchange.

Bread-making, a dietary staple, was established in pre-contact Australia with artefacts used to grind grains from grasses dating back 30,000 years.1 First Nations cultures from across the Australian continent knew how to source, harvest, and maintain grains throughout the seasons.

First Nations people knew the latent agricultural qualities of the grasses and its relationships to water availability and the distinct geographies of place. This is a practice that spans thousands of years.

Researching Country The Grasses and Grains installation builds on the research of Dr Angela Pattison from the University of Sydney Plant Breeding Institute research unit at Narrabri. Her expertise as a plant breeder and agricultural scientist has seen her engage with the local communities to understand and celebrate Gomeroi agricultural knowledge. She is currently working with Gomeroi agriculture trainee Callum Craigie.

The installation provides a shelter for Gomeroi storylines to coalesce with the Country in the form of a temporary place for visitors to touch, smell and hear the grasses, learn about Gamilaraay language and sources of important and prominent native food.

The grasses are simply curated and raised on the tray of country utes. A canopy stretched across the tray supplies shade and provides a seemingly simple design solution that speaks to the simple yet complex biological structures of the grass heads. The design is lightweight in appearance but robust and durable in material – choices that activate the sharing of stories that are important for future food security issues in Australia.

Pascoe, B. (2018). Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture. In Dark Emu. Scribe Publications. p. 30 1

Exchange with Country We each come to this project with our cultural storylines, trained in architecture, and acknowledge the role of placemaking on Country, and the devastation of Country and First Nations cultures from colonialism. With this in mind, there are always opportunities to understand its impact and reach out to engage with all communities to share the storylines of Country through generous acts of exchange.

This has been a focal point of conversation between Michael Mossman (Kuku Yalanji), Jack Gillmer (Worimi Biripi) and Richard Leplastrier – to situate personal storylines and cultural practices within the project engagement setting, and ways we engage with each other. This is an important First Nations protocol: to know your cultural background for exchange to appreciate

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and understand new cultures. It is a space between where you must pay attention, listen, relate, translate and reciprocate gestures as process – to transfer, translate and transform knowledge systems and worldviews.

Visting Country We set off on a road trip to Gomeroi Country to be inspired by the grasses, experience the harsh climates and the natural phenomena. By listening to, seeing, touching, smelling and breathing Country, we were inspired by its mesmerising formations created from volcanic eruptions, which have provided some of the most fertile soils on this continent.

We took in trees swept by winds in open plains; perfect hunting conditions; grasses dancing in the rising and setting sun; Aboriginal markings illustrating signs of habitation, a place with ideal living conditions during all seasons. Among all this, we saw contemporary agricultural systems the farm with no bells and whistles. Elegant with a clear and concise purpose. Our special visit to Gomeroi Country was a unique experience that would become the genesis of the Grass and Grains installation design narrative.

The composition of the installation borrows from the vernacular of the country town – dusty work utes with loaded trays, long spans of purpose-built machines Sharing these storylines alongside

Exhibitions, Symposiums and Intensives

Michael Mossman is Kuku Yalanji with family links to Yarrabah, I grew up in Cairns on Yidinji Country and studied architecture on Ngunnawal Country, and now live and work on Gadigal Country at the University of Sydney.

Jack Gillmer is Worimi Biripi, between Birubi (Stockton sand dunes), and Guparrbang (between Port Macquarie and Kempsey), I grew up on the Central Coast on Darkinjung Country, studied in Newcastle on Awabakal Country, and now live and work on Gadigal Country at SJB. Richard Lepastrier is European Australian, family links to Normandy French Huguenot. I grew up in South Western Australia on Noongar Country, South Eastern Tasmania Country, and Daruk Country, with connections to Yuin Country.

A warm thank you to Steve Burns, Anna Burns, Dylan Wozniak-O’Connor, Sam Choy, Iakovos Amperidis for your hard work and support.

ancient agricultural practices of being on the Country of others to build networks and connections and engender new knowledge for future generations.

With a full-scale exhibition installation postponed due to Covid-19, a 1:10 scale model was fabricated and installed. The design allows groups of people to gather, participate in conversation, feel the grasses, knead the dough, smell the baking bread and eat together. We realised the project at a scale to communicate the sense of placemaking and the intention of the installation, a scale that one can insert themselves, or get a bird’s-eye view of the no-nonsense structure with assistance from DMaF (Design Modelling and Fabrication Lab) at University of Sydney.

We have been fortunate to work with Angela and Callum. They have been the conduit to the Narrabri Aboriginal communities for the sharing of knowledge, and connecting us with local voices in a way that is appropriate to Country. The team involved with the Grasses and Grains project visited Gomeroi Country to build a concept based on listening and collaboration.

The collaboration between the architects and the Narrabri research group has meant that the design of the installation has been shared with the local community. The restrictions to gathering due to Covid-19 will ease and we will revisit Gomeroi Country. With blessings from the Elders we hope to be fortunate enough to walk with them, yarn, learn, collaborate and have their input and participation for the project, to be exhibited at the one-to-one scale in the near future.

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Remote Practices: Architecture in Proximity

Matthew Mindrup University of Sydney

Lilian Chee National University of Singapore

In October of this year, Matthew Mindrup (The University of Sydney) and Lilian Chee (National University of Singapore) organised an international online symposium entitled “Remote Practices” globalisation of the discipline. In it they sought to explore how the remote practice of architecture has become inherent in the way phases of early ideation to late production could take on surprising transformations as architects and critics use different tools to manifest ideas and imaginations to the otherwise distant and invisible – to design, describe and critique future and past constructions in absentia.

As people retreated to their homes during the recent pandemic, the business of doing of the issues we wished to discuss timelier. Architecture, a discipline which thrives on expression and imagination, and which had already been remotely practised by way of translation across different media and sites, took on a further dimension of distancing, this time in the absence of a physical community of architects, designers, teachers and students.

The distances between these different modes of doing architecture—drawings, diagrams and models, manifestos and critiques in the printed form; augmented reality walkthroughs and which architecture may already be understood as a remote practice. In the past few months, the practice and education of architecture has faced a temporary cessation of travel, closure of many and materialised through conversation.

To consider the future of architecture, a diverse and respected group of scholars and designers working from across a broad temporal, geographic, and cultural range, came together for the in architecture.

Conceived in three parts — Practice, Criticism and Education – the entire symposium explored the cultural context of the topic, highlighting important connections and changes across time.

Those contributing to the session on practice investigated how a wide range of technological and practice of architecture at a distance. Paper presentations in the session on criticism considered a wide range of questions that unpack notions about situatedness, subjectivity, the body in space, and what occurs when disparate things are suddenly made proximate, while designers and educators in the session on pedagogy explored what it means to teach and study architecture at a distance from peer and place.

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OXIMITY

Exhibitions, Symposiums and Intensives

Crabs in Wet Season, Christmas Island. Emma Lau, NUS 2020

Image: Crabs in Wet Season, Christmas Island. Emma Lau, NUS, 2020

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Show me! Open Air Exhibition Designs to Activate the University of Sydney campus Sandra Löschke Tutors Eduardo de Oliveira Barata Kate Goodwin Sandra Löschke

BDES1028 Honours Intensive Studio 1 Bachelor of Design in Architecture (Honours) and Master of Architecture

This intensive focused on open air exhibitions as an activator for public space, and asked students to contribute to a competition by the Commission for Sydney: The Public Space Ideas Competition.

Students reimagined the open spaces and streets of the University of Sydney campus as public facilities for exhibitions that enhanced the campus as a culturally inclusive space for students and the public.

Rich precedent study into the history of museums and exhibitions informed how these have been utilised in different ways and to different ends: as representational spaces, experimental laboratories, educational spaces, relational venues for engagement, spaces for critical spatial practices, or demonstrated spaces for visionary ideas. Further, an overview of public space and how this has been conceptualised for various purposes was gained: as spaces for representation, assembly, leisure and transport, or as an ‘urban living room’.

The studio proposed that the exhibition was an instrument that could produce new knowledge and effect changes in the thinking and behaviour of its audience.

‘Subtraction’ Fei Liu

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‘Victoria Steppe’ Joel Chan, Eddy Her, Enock Mak

‘In Focus’

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Smarter Hobart Challenge

Simon Weir

BDES2028 Honours Intensive Studio 2 Bachelor of Design in Architecture (Honours) and Master of Architecture

Students in BDES2028 Honours Intensive Studio 2 worked on Stage 1 competition entries for the City of Hobart’s Smarter Hobart Challenge, to design the world’s most innovative interactive bus shelter. The competition was a creative challenge inviting the most innovative and exciting ideas to help transform Hobart’s public transport services, and help make waiting for the bus reliable, safe, accessible and socially connective. Drawing on our School’s architectural and interaction design expertise, and an introductory lecture by the competition organiser, students developed a modular series of smart bus shelters that would enhance the public transport experience in well-connected city areas and in remote, disconnected rural areas. A thrilling opportunity for our students, and should they be selected to develop their projects in Stage 2, they will collaborate with engineers and stakeholders to develop fabrication plans that will potentially go into production in 2022.

‘JASBAR’ Rebecca Huynh, Anthea Kwan, Bambi Mesa, Saanya Parma, Jasmine Sharp, Antigoni Sioulas

INTRODUCTION

The sculptural bodywork of the shelter is derived from the study of aerodynamic principles. The dominance of Hobart’s NW wind allowed us to generate a design that utilizes air as a part of it’s structure.

Hobart in the current decade is in the forefront of its own cultural renaissance.

It is only befitting that the infrastructure within this city to be the very fuel of this artistic movement, catalysing its transformation.

During harsher weather conditions, the structure is able to passively harness the wind to form protective walls of fast moving air around the shelter, whilst allowing the centre of the station to maintain stillness and peace.

Our proposal focuses on modularity, communication and shelter as tools to optimise our design into one that celebrates a harmony between form and function.

Our design also provides a great modularity in size as well as interior furnishings. Many combinations can be assembled with a series of repeated parts to adapt to its localised context.

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SECTION

‘Bus Shelter Proposal’ Thomas Li, Angela Xu, Yiwen Zhang

STUDENT EXCELLENCE

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Awards, Prizes and Scholarships

Postgraduate Prizes and Scholarships

Undergraduate Prizes and Scholarships

NSW Student Architecture Awards

Bluescope Lysaght Prize in Architectural Design Tara Sydney Von Somogy

Elizabeth Munro Prize in Architecture Amir Ratna Shakya

Brian Patrick Keirnan Prize ‘Immersion’ Antoine Portier and David Cadena

Henry J Cowan Prize in Architectural Science (Undergraduate Architecture) Junhyung Hwang Kevin Luu

Graduate of the Year – Master’s Program Xiaoxi Tan

CHL Turner Memorial Prize in Architectural Design Karin Jia-Lin Ke Ethel M Chettle Prize in Architecture Gloria Ngoc Tran Ha Layla Anna Stanley Sun-Kyoo Kim George McRae Prize in Architectural Construction Jong-Oh Won Henry J Cowan Prize in Architectural Science (Graduate Architecture) James Wen Yu Zhou Feng Alvin Hui James Hartley Bibby Memorial Prize in Architectural Design Chris Koustoubardis Ruskin Rowe Prize for Architecture Gloria Ngoc Tran Ha Sir John Sulman Prize in Architectural Design Chanh Khoa Nguyen Sunlord Perpetual Prize in Architectural Design James Wen Yu Zhou Feng Mirvac Prize Rishikesh Amarnath Gujarathi

Leslie Wilkinson Prize in Architectural History and Theory Stephanie Lee Dodd Noel Chettle Memorial Prize Thomas Zelin Li Ophelia Catherine Paroissien Fan Yang Kyle Stephens Wilson Shanshan Zhang Shiya Liang

Graduate of the Year – Bachelor’s Program Rachel Liang History and Theory Prize Alvin Hui Construction and Practice Prize Jake Boydell Australian Institute of Building NSW Chapter President’s Award Daniel John Natoli Mehrdad Shakourzadeh Isuru Anjana Hettiarachchi Elizabeth Cuan Castiblanco Steven Nix

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‘Immersion’ Antoine Portier and David Cadena

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OUR SPONSORS

The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning would like to thank the following sponsors for their generosity in making the 2020 Architecture Graduate Virtual Exhibition and publication possible.

Platinum NSW Architects Registration Board BLP Cult Grimshaw Gold Bates Smart Silver i2C NBRS Architecture Bronze TKD Architects Trotec

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CONGRATULATIONS to the graduates of the University of Sydney!

We look forward to seeing you in the near future as you continue your journey toward registration.

Image: Boaz Nothman for the Sydney Architecture Festival 2019

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University of Melbourne Werribee Veterinary School

We design for a healthy world

We’re hiring — students and grads Join our team of global experts in social infrastructure design blp.com.au/opportunities opportunities@blp.com.au

Grimshaw Celebrating 40 years globally, 10 years in Sydney.

Monash Woodside Building for Technology and Design, Melbourne 2020 Sustainability Awards—Best Education and Research Building Certified Passivhaus Photography: Rory Gardiner

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Congratulations to this years graduates.

Bates Smart is proud to support The University of Sydney Architecture Graduate Exhibition 2020.

batessmart.com @batessmart

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