Odyssey 2021: Architecture Graduate Exhibition Catalogue

Architecture

2021

Odyssey 2021 © ISBN: 978-0-6484458-3-8 Published for ‘Odyssey 2021’, The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning Graduate Exhibition 2021.

First published in 2021 by Harvest: Fresh scholarship from the field.

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 © Odyssey 2021 This book, Odyssey, and all works depicted in it are © editors and contributors, 2021. All rights reserved.

The Graduate Exhibition elective was run by Kate Goodwin, assisted

by Phillip Gough and Adrian Thai.

The exhibition was devised by the following architecture and design students: Monica Chen, Sue Cho, Yunchen Gong, Kazi Nabil Hasan, Christina Hatgis, Aimee Louise Jeffries, Peter Jorgensen, Jing Yuan (Claire) Lee, Skye Li, Shiya (Vivian) Liang, Lillian Liao, Zihe (Zoe) Lu, Celine Noviany, Lachlan Paull, Andrea Pino Nunura, Alex Pribula, Claire Say, Jiawen Sun, Aldrich Tan Kah Kei, Andreas Thoma, Harry Tse, Isabel M H Tseng, Yu-Wen (Monica) Tsui, Viswajith Unnikrishnan, Harry Wiraputra and Ting (Judy) Zhao.

The Graduate Exhibition was realised by the External Engagement team, Steven Burns, Juthamus Marsh, Adrian Thai. The Exhibition has been supported by Iakovos Amperidis and Tin Sheds Gallery team, with Zoe Skinner, Dylan Wozniak-O'Connor and the Design Modelling and Fabrication team, and by SDRS.

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.

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Contents

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DEAN’S WELCOME Robyn Dowling

42 MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE

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EDITORIAL Kate Goodwin

92

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FOREWORD Lee Stickells

12

THINK PIECES

126 BACHELOR OF

ARCHITECTURE AND ENVIRONMENTS

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Learning to Walk: A 5km Odyssey Peter Jorgensen

18

Authentic Travel Matthew Mindrup

22 MyRobotKitchen

Dagmar Reinhardt,

Lian Loke 26

A Reflection on Acoustic Retroflection in Architecture Densil Cabrera

30

Out of Sight Andrew Leach

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Techne, Technology, Materials and Labour Duanfang Lu

38 Object-Oriented

Ontology and

Architectural Darkness

Simon Weir

BACHELOR OF DESIGN IN ARCHITECTURE

152 SYMPOSIUMS,

INTENSIVES AND EXHIBITIONS 164

STUDENT EXCELLENCE

168

SPONSORS

Odyssey

School of Architecture, Design and Planning

6

Dean's Welcome

Robyn Dowling Head of School and Dean, Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

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The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning sits proudly on Gadigal land, where Aboriginal people have taught, learnt and nurtured since time immemorial. As the 2021 academic year began, the School welcomed new students with activities on the site now known as Gadigal Green, once a popular Gadigal fishing spot in Blackwattle Creek. It also welcomed students joining us from dozens of countries across the world, studying remotely for the 1st or 2nd year.

By late June, the Wilkinson Building – the material fabric that anchors our vibrant and diverse community that is welcoming of all – fell silent. Stairwells emptied, homebases sparsely occupied, public lectures stopped. As I write this, Wilkinson remains in hibernation.

Teaching, learning and nurturing continued however beyond Wilkinson. Staff and students spread across Australia and the world - Kamilaroi, Dharug, Melbourne, Beijing, Mexico to name a 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 2021 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 degrees and, especially relevant to this catalogue, in curating our first hybrid – virtual and in-person – graduate exhibition. 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.

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Editorial

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Collectively

Kate Goodwin Professor of Practice, Architecture, Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

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This year’s exhibition graphic of topographic islands evokes the Odyssey journey and represents the three disciplines of the School; architecture, design and planning, showcased together for the first time in several years. They evoke the mountains students climb in each course and in their chosen discipline as they develop knowledge and build resilience; they symbolise the importance of cross-fertilisation of ideas between the different fields; and they invite us to share the unique journey of this year’s graduating students.

For us all, the year has undoubtably been a journey, with unexpected challenges and revelations. What will we take away from these experiences? In the fields of design and the built environment, in education, as in practice, we have seen how peer-to-peer learning and collaboration enrich how we question, challenge and innovate. Conceiving and producing this year’s Graduation Exhibition has been a collaborative effort like never before. Online and largely unknown to one another, architecture and design students from five courses came together in an elective to devise the exhibition conceptually, physically and virtually, breaking down disciplinary language barriers to share perspectives and skills. Teams of talented staff have worked to translate their vision, adapting to changing circumstances and making the physical exhibition a reality.

While this catalogue may show the work of individuals – a selection of student projects from across degrees and think pieces from staff and a student – these works and ideas are enhanced and supported by friends, peers, family and tutors.

The pandemic has shown the possibility for global co-operation and the ability to make change at an unprecedented speed, it has also exposed the deep inequality imbedded in geopolitics and society close to home. These times calls for us to think collectively and act collaboratively. The student's journey has only just begun and it is exciting to think that they will be at the forefront of innovations that can make our cities and lives more sustainable, equitable, connected and rewarding.

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Foreword

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Gates of Horn, Gates of Ivory

Lee Stickells Head of Architecture, Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning

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Odyssey is the theme our students settled on for the 2021 graduation exhibition. And, why not?

The continuing twists and turns of the Covid pandemic have made this year feel very much like a testing journey in search of the home we think of as normality. While Odysseus might have made it back to Ithaca and the arms of his wife Penelope, we cannot return home. Life has changed—is changing—irrevocably and in ways we are yet to fully fathom. Spun and caught in the pandemic’s eddies and flows, questions about what will survive and what will (and perhaps must) be lost or transformed surface all around us. We look for omens to help us navigate these questions, and, in this, the exhibition theme is doubly apt. The Odyssey is full of omens with prophetic significance for understanding future change. Architecture is even key to their deciphering; when Penelope is disturbed by a dream in which an eagle viciously kills a gaggle of geese she is attending, she is upset, puzzled, and in ruminating over its symbolism recalls that all dreams emerge from one of two gates: one made of horn, the other made of ivory. Those that pass through the gate of ivory, she says, are deceptive. Whereas dreams that come through the gate of polished horn tell the truth.

The student work on display in the exhibition and in this catalogue offers a multitude of omens. Collectively, the projects grapple with an awareness of architecture’s responsibility to address and influence change—responding to technological and cultural developments as well as ecological, political, and human crises. They demonstrate the students’ growing technical skills and critical abilities while also making experimental propositions about the environments we will come to live in and the profession’s future boundaries. Whether they derive from gates of horn or ivory is uncertain at present (dreams lack flesh and bones, Penelope argues). What is certain, however, is that the students’ impressive work reveals a vital continuity rather than a rupture— their efforts lack none of the energy, rigour, insight or ambition of previous years. In the adversity of the moment, they (as well as the teaching staff and wider support networks) have brilliantly reorganised themselves, adapted, and continued to produce fascinating, committed, and inspiring work.

We wish our 2021 graduating students all the very best in their future careers. The Odyssey exhibition and catalogue is an auspicious omen.

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THINK PIECES

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Think Pieces

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Learning to Walk: A 5km Odyssey Peter Jorgensen Graduating Bachelor of Design in Architecture student

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It’s my third walk of the day, feet beating a metronomic rhythm as I weave my way through the back streets of another Inner West suburb. The daily routes have varied, but remain predominantly aimless meanderings in the general direction of a takeaway flat white.

These walks have become mappings, street-by-street reinterpretations of local neighbourhoods. I am aware of the way magnolias flowering in front yards announce the coming of spring. And the daily patterns of sun and shade in Henson Park. I have discovered that all the cherry blossom trees between my front door and the Marrickville Library (caffeine refill station of choice) are hybrids, twin trunks that flower in sequence; pink then white. None of this should be taken as the all-toocommon romanticisation of what has undoubtedly been a traumatic period: magnolias signal spring, but also the darkest depths of a frantic, monotonous solitude. Instead, walking can be used as an analogy for the reimagining of our relationship to place, and how this might inform a future design process in education and practice.

Australia’s First Nations peoples have long been aware of the rhythmic potential of walking. Songs were learnt ‘as people travelled to the places named in the song and the rhythm of walking took the song into the body. Through the body, song became dance, which in turn became ceremony.’1 The landscape acts as a mnemonic device, a vast archive of knowledge stored within the land, sea and stars, accessed through song, dance and ceremony. Body and place are mutually constitutive, the identity of the body incomplete without a relationship to place, and the potential of place dormant until ‘unlocked’ by the dancing body.2 Within this relationship of memory, movement and landscape is the potential for a uniquely Australian process of placemaking, a ‘third space,’ that does away with the traditional dichotomy of architecture versus landscape.

An architecture that centres on the exchange of stories in an ongoing conversation between multiple collective narratives and the landscape in which they play out.

If how we build is indicative of collective values and

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John Carty et al., We Don’t Need a Map: A Martu Experience of the Western Desert, (Fremantle, WA: Freemantle Arts Centre,2013), 40. Quoted in Neale and Kelly, Songlines: The Power and Promise, p.54.

2 Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly. Songlines: The Power and Promise, edited

by Margo Neale (Melbourne: Thames and Hudson, 2020), 54-5.

3 Lee Stickells and Glen Hill, Pig Architecture, Architectureau, June 22, 2012, https://architectureau.com/articles/pig-architecture/?fbclid=IwAR29ejwcKapFt_HJEN-S2vhDK95Mtcdg2lWxTvqgH3VnWj-rBWdq5wngJOU. 4 Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1960), 20.

5 I would particularly like to give my deepest thanks to Lucy Small, Antony Fenhas and Kate Goodwin for their time, conversations, edits and revisions in the process of writing this piece.

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of architectural education cannot be removed from the context in which we practice. How do we remain flexible, as students, educators, and practitioners in this changing context? Are we content with perpetuating existing structures or do they need to be dismantled and rebuilt?

Learning to walk as placemakers means learning to listen and draw meaning from a multitude of overlaid social, political, ecological and cultural narratives. It means amplifying traditionally marginalised voices and centering Indigenous stories. Importantly, it also means gaining a deeper understanding of our own individual stories and their relationship to a wider cultural identity and concept of place. My own conversations with various tutors, lecturers and students have been instrumental in furthering my own interest and investigation of the ideas in this reflection, and I am deeply grateful for it.5 As graduating students, we find ourselves at a unique point of reflection. What does it mean to build ‘place’ in Australia, and how does this concept inform our own identity as practitioners? We are taking our first steps on a long and complex journey towards an understanding of not only how, but why we build.

Let’s make sure we find time for a yarn or two along the way.

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societal identity, then our journey as architects-to-be is deeply connected to an examination of those collective values. What is the significance of place in Australian identity? As architects, are we creating space for marginalised narratives? How do we acknowledge that everything we build in this country is on unceded First Nations land? How should an architectural education address collective identity, particularly in Australia’s oldest architecture school, in one of its long-standing colonial institutions?

These are questions that we need to answer collectively, and recently some forums have been created within the architecture school to begin to do so. Spaces like the Yarning Circle, a monthly meet-up for staff and students to listen to indigenous voices and to share stories. Or the collaborative initiative of teach-outs in the Wilkinson courtyard in protest of university wide course cuts. Some course directors have started regular meetings, open to all students, aimed at providing immediate feedback on course content and structure. Still lacking, however, are spaces that provide opportunities for students to play an active, ongoing role in the creation of our education as a whole. Spaces for the collaborative critique of the relationship between our education and our context, and for speculation as to what could be. The architecture school has a long tradition of experimentation in these areas, with various student and staff movements in the early 70s, such as The Autonomous House from 1974-78, radically redefining student ownership and direction in our education.3 What lessons can be learnt from this tradition, and how relevant are they in our current political, ecological and architectural context?

The significance of immersion in site and its implications for the Australian identity could also be examined. As the daily walk teaches us, it takes repeated engagement with a place to begin to understand it.

While the studio and the office are practical necessities to architectural practice, there is a reason that our most revered architects, LePlastrier, Murcutt and Stutchbury, physically locate their masterclasses on the site of the design. Implicit in the structure of these masterclasses is a move to a slower practice, a deeper engagement with our surroundings and our place within them. If, as Robin Boyd writes, the Australian Ugliness is rooted in an anxiety in the face of the sheer scale of our continental landscape,4 then this may be a step towards its cure. In our current economic environment the idea of a slower practice seems almost unattainable, but this is exactly why we need places of intersectional critique. The nature

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Authentic travel

Matthew Mindrup Program Director, Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

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The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent.

One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca. ― Anthony Bourdain

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In the cited quote, the former chef, author, and travel documentarian, Anthony Bourdain, encouraged readers to expand their knowledge about themselves and the world they live in through travel. To do this, Bourdain warned, there is a difference between serious travelling and aimless wandering. Travel isn’t always pretty, nor relaxing. When we travel, we can often feel like we had the rug pulled out from beneath our feet and must call on our wits to make sense of the different ways people organise their cities, prepare their food or celebrate the changing seasons of life. In this experience travel leaves marks on our individual and cultural memory.

Architects have long held the act of travel as an important undertaking in their education and development. Indeed, in late medieval Europe, a stone mason who completed their apprenticeship and graduated to the title of ‘journeyman’ was expected to complete their education by moving from town to town for three years as journée (day) workers. On this trip, journeymen would learn about different methods of design and construction while working for different masters in different workshops. The word ‘travel’ entered the English language during this time from the French travailen (v) meaning to make a journey and originally travail (n.) “labor, toil,” referring directly to these day workers traveling around Europe.

Beginning around the middle of the seventeenth century, young upper-class European gentlefolk including aspiring architects began embarking on travel tours around the Mediterranean. The term ‘Grand Tour’ to describe this educational excursion was first used

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in their thoughts like a tourist who doesn’t bother to learn where they are and misinterprets a fountain as a swimming pool. Many of us have had a similar experience in our design education when a critic points out to a student that the building next to their day care centre design is not a church but a factory.

Echoing Bourdain, students, please travel. Your critic may be your guide, but they are not there to find souvenirs for you. Learn where and how you are at any place. This will give you clues how to look for authentic designs. Travel means being serious about your journey.

It means taking risks and accepting that you will not know where you will end up. But what a great set of souvenirs you will have at the end.

Odyssey

in the French translation of Richard Lassels’, Voyage or a Compleat Journey through Italy from 1670 wherein he asserts that any serious student of architecture, antiquity and the arts must travel through France and Italy to understand the intellectual, social, political and ethical realities of the world. On this journey, travel was typically accompanied by a chaperone and a guide known as a ‘bear-leader’ responsible for their cultural, literary, and artistic training. Therein, the grand tourist would have an opportunity to acquire things unavailable at home, lending an air of accomplishment and prestige to the traveller, including books, works of art, measured drawings, plaster casts, cork models, scientific instruments, and cultural artefacts.

Souvenirs, such as those acquired during a Grand Tour are objects taken from a place one visits as either a sign of a having been there or an aid to help the user remember a particular experience of the place.

A souvenir is considered authentic when it cannot be obtained from any other location or producer. For this reason, a mass-produced Eiffel Tower salt and pepper shaker is less authentic than a concert poster taken off a wall in Rome or a handbag produced by a local artisan in Barcelona.

Designers also describe the design of architecture as a journey. For the Bauhaus Master, Paul Klee, drawing was akin to ‘taking a line for a walk.’ For an architect in particular, their journey to the proposed building site occurs in the imagination and their discoveries are made visible using a pen, pixel, or knife. In this situation, can the drawing or model an architect creates of a proposed design be compared to the souvenir? For the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa drawings are visual descriptions of the discoveries they found during the design process, and he draws because he ‘want(s) to see things, that’s all I really trust. I put them down in front of me on paper so that I can see them. I want to see and that’s why I draw. I can see an image only if I draw it.’ But then, is the model of a proposed structure whose forms and spaces are found everywhere on ArchDaily any different than the Eiffel Tower salt and pepper shaker? If we can answer no, what then is authentic travel in terms of design?

A bus tour of Europe can be an authentic form of travel if one wishes to engage in an ‘Authentic European Bus Tour’. But this would be comparable to letting your critic act as your tour guide through the design of your project. Any souvenir the designer acquires on such a tour will remind them less about the discoveries they made than the journey they took through the eyes of their critic. Conversely, a designer may wander aimlessly

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MyRobotKitchen

Dagmar Reinhardt Associate Professor Lian Loke Associate Professor, Head of Design

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Imagine you are in the kitchen and a robot is right next to you, working with you, side by side, to prepare a delicious meal. Alternatively, this kitchen might be a workshop, with a variety of different tools and processes taking place, which are more precisely differentiated by cold and hot stations and materials.

What is the nature of a domestic space in 2030?

A place for food production and consumption? A place where families create their stories around the different processes that are centred around food? Food defines culture(s). Food makes communities and brings people together. Food shapes our memories and personal experience, and is intimately connected to identity, our families, and our cultural backgrounds. Interestingly, architecture and food share defining aspects and criteria: body, place, time, process, materiality. A shared meal is of social significance as one of the oldest exchanges between people, where traditional rituals and customs feature particular dishes (and preparation thereof) that are deeply ingrained in culture. Dishes evoke memories of childhood comfort, of ancestry and heritage.

The changes that have taken place to the architecture of the kitchen over centuries is a domain of research, design, engineering, anthropological studies and artistic speculation. In the dark and spacious medieval kitchens, livestock was kept, and trade conducted. The Frankfurter Kitchen by Grete Schuette-Lihotzky organises storage items and optimises body movement. In Francis Bacon’s messy and artistic workshop-kitchen, paint brushes were cleaned. Allen Wexler’s Crate house neatly packs kitchen and household items into a series of cubes and crates.

In Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle, the kitchen is an unknown landscape where the functions and programs cannot be derived from the objects. Hariri and Hariri suggested a digital butler for MOMA’s Un-private House exhibition: a personalised chef who provides recipe instructions through digital interactive surface.

MyRobotKitchen1 explores robots in the kitchen as a domain for human-robot collaboration. How is a cobot framework set up? ‘Cobots’, also known as collaborative

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MyRobotKitchen is a research project by D Reinhardt and L Loke in collaboration with DMaF and BOSCH and a C2P2021research elective.

2 Colgate and Peshkin, 1996 2 Moley, https://moley.com/ 3 Colgate, JEC 1996 ’Cobots: Robots for Collaboration with Human Operators’, Proceedings of the International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exhibition, (Atlanta, pp. 433-439) 1

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by a human (movement and dexterity, sensing, reach) while for others a robot is better (exact motions, heat resistance, repetition) define a number of primitive motions for the robot in correspondence to a tool (coupling an action with a function), such as grabbing, releasing, moving, dropping, hitting, pouring, mixing, and flipping. These motions require a movement line through space, and the rotation of the robot arm, and can be part of a motion library created first manually (tracking in space) or digitally (defining a line in GH). test all motions by simulation in KUKA|prc to check robot path, potential collisions and workability, so that robot actions can be corrected or confirmed working with the actual robot, establish a database and motion library that allows categorisation and repurposing of motions and actions, trial and adapt robot programs in a different context repeat.

Embedded in this site for domestic life, the robot becomes a support act, collaborator, and performer – a remote or distant role model or family member. Food production and preparation require skill and patience.

Cooking is a craft with embodied knowledge of the tools and utensils, of the heat and temperatures, of the chemistry of different ingredients. A robot can be trained for action and in return teach and demonstrate process knowledge. Extrapolating from this – actions and tasks, analytical studies and pipelines developed through MyRobotKitchen could be used for many other applications where robots and human work in the same space.

Introducing a robot arm to our kitchens fundamentally connects to larger concerns of how we live, what resources are available, and how these are distributed.

The kitchen has its own rules of economy and in that sense is a microcosm of the world. A robot-supported domestic environment can connect to big data, and thus address reverse speed, homogeny, expediency and globalisation. It can link into initiatives such as the Slow food and Farm-to-Fork movements; integrate with community gardens; share communal values of regional context and supply; and support the individual in adapting methods for sustainable resources, waste and recycling strategies and circular economies.

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robots, corobots, and Intelligent Assist Devices (IADs), are designed to allow humans and robots working together side by side, in direct physical interaction with a human user and within a shared workspace2. HumanRobot collaboration has generated interest across the robotics and manufacturing industries. Unlike traditional robot applications, collaborative applications allow operators to share their workspace safely. Usually, employing advanced proximity sensing technology enables a conventional industrial robot to be turned into a cobot.

Defined as International Standards ISO 10218 and to assist in co-working, collaborative features include safety monitored stops (where a cobot will cease movement temporarily when a human enters the work zone); hand guiding (to teach a robot a path through a sequences of motions required to complete a task, using end effector technology to sense position and read forces); speed and separation monitoring (with frequent human intervention, laser vision systems allow the robot to sense a human’s proximity and be programmed accordingly); and finally, power and force limiting (whereby robots read forces such as pressure, resistance or impacts using embedded sensors).

A world-first consumer robotic kitchen was launched by Moley in 2020,3 with a chef’s methods and techniques captured through a 3D motion tracking system and translated into movement using bespoke algorithms, able to deliver 500-plus recipes. In contrast, MyRobotKitchen investigates the adoption of a six-axis robot arm for residential domestic use, by developing method to translate cooking, as a series of actions, into cooking with an industrial robotic arm. At the core of this human-robot collaboration sits a three-arm problem: there are two human arms, and one robotic one within the same space and work zone. A simple strategy for cooking with an industrial robotic arm could look like this: • arrange your kitchen utensils, including plates, bowls and tools, around the robot • place pre-measured amounts of ingredients for the recipe and set the cookware around the target robot • digitise tools and invent tooling hybrids (a ‘spife’/spoon/knife etc) • test a setup through a robot simulation in the robot programming software KUKA|prc (which effectively replicates the cooking environment) • analyse the actions that can be undertaken by a human, and by the robotic arm, with particular focus on what is achievable and what is meaningful. Some motions can be done better

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A Reflection on Acoustic Retroreflection in Architecture Densil Cabrera Associate Professor

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Image credits: Densil Cabrera and Mary Rapp

Architectural acoustics is known for its surprises and delights, as much as for the mundane headaches of the sound environment. Over recent years my colleagues and I have been experimenting with something that we consider to be a delight: acoustically retroreflective surfaces. Just as a bicycle reflector reflects light back in the direction from which it came, architectural surfaces can be designed to reflect sound back to the source, wherever that source is.

But sound is different to light in many ways, both physical and perceptual. The physical wavelengths of sound are on a human scale (ranging between 17 m to 17 mm – shorter wavelengths for higher frequencies), whereas wavelengths of light are miniscule. This comes into play when we design surfaces to reflect sound – facets must be large enough for the relevant waves.

Furthermore, people engage with sound differently to light: speaking and hearing are very different to seeing.

So retroreflection of sound is designed on a different scale to optical retroreflection, and is phenomenologically distinct. In these respects, we are not strictly designing acoustic bicycle reflectors.

There are various ways by which acoustically retroreflective surfaces can be made, but an array of concave right-angle corners is certainly the easiest. The intersecting faces that form the corners need to have edge lengths in the 0.2 – 1 m range to have an appreciable audible effect on one’s own voice. There is a trade-off here between reflector size, number of reflectors, and distance – which affects the frequency range over which they are effective, along with the overall strength of the reflection onto the source. Reflectors that are too small or too distant will only affect very high frequencies, perhaps too high to affect the audible quality of the space.

My colleagues and I have designed and built numerous prototypes, and in our more mature work have created a room 50% covered with acoustic retroreflectors. It seems likely that this is the world’s first intentionally designed, predominantly acoustically retroreflective room. Nevertheless, acoustic

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environments. For example, in open-plan offices, distraction from other people’s speech is a notorious and widely researched problem. When people can hear their own voice better, they speak more quietly. Hence a retroreflective ceiling will concentrate the sound around a talking person, reducing both the voice projection used by the person and the relative transmission of sound across the room. Further experiments are needed to see whether this actually ameliorates the problem of speech distraction.

Why are retroreflective treatments not in the standard repertoire for architectural acoustic design?

A practical reason might be the relatively large surface modulations that are needed to create simple retroreflectors – which may be unwanted in many practical situations. However, there are alternatives to the arrays of right-angles that we have been using in our experiments – and perhaps it is possible to create surfaces that are more spatially efficient and less visually striking.

A deeper reason is that the commonly used theories of room acoustics, and the widely used acoustic simulation software, only account for two types of reflection (specular reflections and scattering). The issues with such simulation software come from ray-based algorithms of sound propagation that might be thought of as having blind-spots to retroreflection and other anomalous reflections. These tools close off opportunities and limit the acoustic designer’s imagination.

Fortunately, present day computational capacity makes wave-based acoustic simulation accessible, allowing us to simulate the effects of retroreflective surfaces – at least in the university context. Increasingly this will become accessible to professional designers.

Acoustically retroreflective surfaces for architectural acoustics need more research. One area that we have been exploring is the optimisation of surfaces, so that they reflect even more sound back to the source.

This is done by curving the surfaces to provide a quasi-focus onto the target area of a room – using 3D parametric modelling coupled with acoustic wave-based simulation. Our prototypes work well. Another challenge is to make visually innocuous and spatially compact retroreflectors, which can be done using other retroreflection techniques. Beyond passive acoustics treatment, we have also been thinking about active techniques for retroreflection, including the fascinating potential of time-reversal acoustics processing. Regardless of the techniques used, we need to develop a deeper understanding of how people respond to retroreflective treatments, though large-scale prototype installations.

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retroreflection is found elsewhere in architecture. It occurs incidentally in certain building facades (e.g., the Ports 1961 Flagship Store in Shanghai), but also in more conventional facades. It is also seen incidentally in some Indian stepwells (e.g., Chand Baori in Abhaneri, Rajasthan). It is used intentionally in certain auditoria, where right-angle reflectors are used to help support the musical performers. Interestingly, the Sydney Opera House’s concert hall, in its original construction, is a case in point – but its retroreflective treatment (in the form of right-angle saw-tooth surfaces) was removed because of the perceived over-emphasis of high frequencies in the reflections.

Retroreflective surfaces reflect back to a person as they speak. They create a crisp sound for one’s own voice. When speaking, I particularly hear consonants like /s/, /sh/, /ch/, /k/ and /t/ very strongly. These phonemes are energetic in the high frequency range. To me this crisp characteristic is not disturbing – rather I find that it contributes to speaking comfort.

Research literature on acoustic voice support has repeatedly shown that people find acoustically supportive rooms (in which they hear their own voice strongly) to be comfortable for speaking in, and that this leads to more relaxed voice projection. This has been studied particularly in classrooms, where sufficient acoustic voice support reduces teacher voice strain.

Our laboratory research into the type of voice support offered by retroreflective treatment (i.e., restricted to high frequencies) has shown that it too leads people to instinctively speak in a more relaxed manner.

My impression is that acoustically retroreflective treatment creates a particularly intimate acoustic quality. The room sounds like a smaller space than its physical size, and I think that this adds to the comfortable impression of the room’s acoustics. This auditory spatial intimacy might be explained from the fact that smaller rooms tend to be louder and less reverberant, both of which are achieved by the retroreflective treatment.

My colleague Mary Rapp (musician and PhD student at USYD) has designed and built a retroreflective dome (2m diameter) which is installed in the remote Burragorang Valley. She uses this for singing practice, based on the Korean tradition of P’ansori. The dome provides an extraordinarily high level of acoustic support, allowing Mary to focus on details of quiet singing, in contrast to her powerful singing practice at a nearby waterfall.

A less esoteric potential practical application for retroreflective acoustics might be multi-talker

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Out of Sight

Andrew Leach Professor of Architecture

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Image credit: Project for Ankerhof, Hoher Markt, Vienna, designed by Ernst von Gotthilf-Miskolczy and Alexander Neumann, 1913-14. Alexander Neumann papers, in the care of Andrew Leach. Courtesy Maria Newman.

About one year ago, I received a call from a number that came up as originating in Cornwall (where I don’t believe I know anybody). I screened it, as I’m wont to do, but an email exchange started up soon thereafter. The caller, now writer, was the granddaughter of one Cäcilie Smetana, born Neumann, who spent much of her life in Vienna. The caller’s mother had escaped to England in 1938 and made her life there. The family story is tragic, but my caller has written about it in a book called A Silence That Speaks: A Family Story Through and Beyond the Holocaust. Since I’ve recalled her book, I’ll identify my caller as Susan Soyinka, an educational psychologist and social historian.

The Smetana family home was designed by her elder brother, an architect named Alexander Neumann who cut his teeth on opera houses and theatres at various scales across the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1880s and 90s, and an important architect of banks and office buildings across the same territory in the years that followed. He designed several villas, including what is now called the Villa Low Beer in Brno, which sits at the opposite end of the Tugendhat property on which Mies also later famously built. Besides all this work for the wealthy, Neumann was something of a property developer, and his own son eventually extended that practice when the elder Neumann (first cousin to Susan’s mother) entered retirement. Hardly a prophet of modernism, Neumann’s work is nonetheless prominent in his hometown of Vienna—many of the banks and insurance house buildings remain standing, if modernised and repurposed; his Palais Fanto (designed with Ernst Gotthilf-Miskowlczy) houses the Arnold Schönberg Center. He was, in his time, a big deal.

The Anschluß made life dangerous for Vienna’s Jews—even as it made Jews out of Austrians who had hitherto been secular, modern, and cosmopolitan beyond all else. Neumann’s son, Friedrich, was doubly in danger, having followed Hannes Meyer to Moscow more than a decade earlier to advance projects on the first Soviet five-year plans and thereby acquiring a red stain, too, in

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as I once called it. It was one of these pieces, written together with a former student, that Susan Soyinka had encountered, and which prompted her to pick up the phone. As of 1939, nobody of her grandmother’s family knew what had happened to Alexander and his family.

And the converse also held. The escape from Vienna had simply broken those ties. This article had alerted her to lives lived elsewhere, and to the possibility of knowing something about the world into which her mother was born, and which her grandmother had lived.

It was a confronting story to encounter. No less shocking than any other that survives from those years, but closer because I had with me some of its material.

And so I took those drawings that were safely sitting under my expansive desk in Wilkinson and started spreading them out, scanning them, ordering them, and talking to a publisher, thinking about what a book might look like, and do. I took a pile of prints and photographs (the robust pieces that stand apart from those sheets that are fragile and feeling their age) to share with students in my graduate seminar — a first step in talking about this work once more.

For the most part, I now think of it as an obligation to tell the story and share the evidence, much of which will no longer have its corollary in Europe. To say something that will not only form a kind of monument to Alexander Neumann—something his family can appreciate, including family that, I learned, had made their way to Australia—but which can help to account for a moment that happened long before I was born and yet feels close.

My desk has been covered with these drawings, tracings and photographic prints for much of the year as I sort through them afresh, but nothing has moved since June. One day I was in my routine; the next not so much.

But this is the work that suits me best, and I look forward to a new year in which I can literally dust off these papers and return to the task of delivering on a commitment that is now decades old, and which suddenly feels larger.

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the eyes of the Nazi regime.

Friedrich escaped to England, as did his cousin (though I know not who went first). He was granted permission to travel to Colombia but landed closer to home before finding passage and opportunities further afield in New Zealand, securing work and a refugee’s visa through the storied Department of Housing Construction.

Alexander Neumann left nearly a year later, well into 1939, escaping by way of Switzerland with his wife Hedwig Pisling-Neumann (an accomplished painter), and likewise arriving, eventually, to Wellington, stopping at Sydney en route. Others of the extended family left for other places. Some didn’t. Some died.

Both took with them a lot of stuff. Furniture, books, china, glassware, silver—the materials of a life they hoped to transplant in what was in that moment being celebrated as an experiment in social democracy (not least by Friedrich’s new fishing buddy, the American sociologist Lesley Lipson). They took with them, too, evidence of their working lives: Hedwig, her paintings; Alexander, his drawings, photographs, and even his draughting table and stool.

I worked at that table, sitting on that stool, for a spell at the end of the 1990s, doing research among the private papers of Friedrich Neumann (who anglicised his name to Frederick Newman in 1947, the same year in which Alexander passed away). I was interested in his involvement as a senior architect in New Zealand’s post-war hydroelectricity generation program, designing dams and powerhouses, substations and public information collateral. I found the relationship of his background and experience to his current work entirely compelling.

And he wrote, a lot, and taught. I ended up making my first book on him. He had himself died in 1964, but his daughter Maria held his memory and legacy close.

At some point in 1999, I visited Maria only to learn that she had been contacted by the family who had bought the (then) Newman family home years earlier, who were moving elsewhere. In the attic they had found several paintings as well as a worn folio of aged drawings—dozens of prints of architectural drawings, mixed in with a smaller number of original ink drawings, all of which ranged across plans, sections, construction details and (even) a rudimentary air conditioning diagram from the 1890s. They had been taken from Vienna with the elder Neumanns as evidence of their lives as architect and artist respectively.

After I worked through them with the architect’s granddaughter, I became their custodian, and on a couple of occasions wrote about this portfolio in exile,

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Techne, Technology, Materials and Labour Duanfang Lu Professor of Architecture and Urbanism

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Image: Built during the late Northern Wei Dynasty (386–534), the Hanging Temple in Datong, China, is a structural marvel supported by timber poles and cantilever beams fitted in sockets chiselled into the rock cliffs (photo taken by the author in 2014).

Architecture necessitates the integration of techne, technology, materials, and labour in construction.

Techne is defined here as intelligence and craft put into the practice of construction, which is the artistic side of technics. According to Demetri Porphyrios (2002), techne in Greek stood in opposition to nature (physis), and formulated knowledge into specialised procedures and methods. Their execution transforms raw material into products in such a way that the latter’s appearance reveals the way in which they are made in contrast to natural things (Figure 1). Gevork Hartoonian (1994: 29) traces the use of the term by Vitruvius and Palladio, stressing ‘the ontological bond between art and science’. From the end of the 17th century, he argues, due to the rise of the Cartesian logic and other tools that measured the natural world, people began to pay more attention to the inner structure of architecture beyond the outer appearance. As a result, techne, in its classical sense, was replaced by technology or technique (ibid.).

The renewed interest in techne was associated with the late-20th-century attempts to advance the art of architectural making by privileging tectonics over stereotomics in response to the scenographic approach of postmodernism (Frampton 1995). The taxonomy can be traced to Gottfried Semper’s ([1851]1989; 2004) writings, which distinguished the critical elements of architecture in terms of the tectonic, associated with lightweight framing components, and the stereotomic, as a form of earthwork construction with the stacking of heavyweight units. Relating to these are two technical skills of masonry and carpentry: while solid mass is piled up in the masonry system, carpentry represents a different constructional method with linear, lightweight elements connected through joints. While Semper conceptualized the tectonic to develop a new architectural reasoning to move beyond the stylistic focus of his time, the late 20th-century theorists sought to break with the postmodernist fever that occupied their contemporaries by forming new theories that stressed tectonic sensitivity and material integrity. Kenneth Frampton ([1990]1996:

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List of References Arantes, Pedro Fiori (2019) The Rent of Form: Architecture and Labor in the Digital Age, trans. Adriana Kauffmann. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bañón, Carlos and Félix Raspall (2020) 3D Printing Architecture: Workflows, Applications, and Trends. Singapore: Springer Singapore.

Brownell, Blaine (2011) Matter in the Floating World. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Deamer, Peggy and Phillip G. Bernstein (eds.) (2010) Building (in) the Future: Recasting Labor in Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

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Deamer, Peggy (2020) Architecture and Labor, New York: Routledge.

Forty, Adrian (2012) Concrete and Culture: A Material History, London: Reaktion Books.

Frampton, Kenneth (1987) “The Work of Tadao Ando”, in Yukio Futagawa (ed.) GA Architect: Tadao Ando, Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita.

Frampton, Kenneth (1995) Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Frampton, Kenneth ([1990]1996) “Rappel à L’ordre, the Case for the Tectonic”, republished in Kate Nesbitt (ed) Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture, New York: Princeton Architecture Press.

Hartoonian, Gevork (1994) Ontology of Construction: On Nihilism of Technology in Theories of Modern Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kolarevic, Branko (ed.) (2003) Architecture in the Digital Age: Design and Manufacturing. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Leatherbarrow, David and Mohsen Mostafavi (2002) Surface Architecture.

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Marble, Scott (2012) Digital Workflows in Architecture: Design, Assembly, Industry. Basel: Birkhäuser.

Picon, Antoine (2010) Digital Culture in Architecture. Basel: Birkhauser.

Porphyrios, Demetri (2002) “From Techne to Tectonics,” in Andrew Ballantyne (ed.) What is Architecture? London: Routledge, pp. 129-37.

Ruskin, John (1960) The Stones of Venice. New York: Da Capo.

Semper, Gottfried ([1851]1989) The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, tr. Harry F. Mallgrave, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Semper, Gottfried (2004) Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetics, tr. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute.

Spiller, Neil and Nic Clear (1995) Educating Architects: How Tomorrow’s Practitioners Will Learn Today. London: Thames & Hudson.

Stephenson, Judy Z. (2020) Contracts and Pay Work in London Construction 1660–1785. Cham: Springer.

Zhai, Lilin (1955) “Lun jianzhu yishu yu mei ji minzu xingshi” [On the Art of Architecture, Beauty, and National Forms], Jianzhu xuebao [The Architectural Journal], no. 1: 46-68.

the tastes of former times, due to the elevated salary of craftsmen. Irony and parody in architectural postmodernism, though usually considered a common symptom of the time, may be read as a grudging reaction of this dilemma. The resulting postmodernist architecture was, more often than not, kitschy, flat, and pseudo-historical.

Signaling a deep dissatisfaction with this scenographic effect, the tectonic discourse in the 1990s introduced a new education of desire for craft-like detailing in architecture. The new Arabian Nights phantasm that tectonics theorists presented is no longer the one created by delicate stone reliefs bustling in the Venetian sun under Ruskin’s pen. Instead, students of architecture are instilled with a new desire for ‘the effect of a mass dematerialised by light’ in Tadao Ando’s concrete, whose materiality is ‘denied by the apparent lightness of its slightly undulating tactile surface’ (Frampton 1987: 21).

The craft of making and detailing often means more time investment from architects, turning the latter into contemporary craftsmen. Some delicate projects by Peter Zumthor, for example, took years of work.

The technological has replaced the tectonic as the new focus of attention since the late 1990s. A range of developments in digital architecture have radically changed the relationship between designing and making: algorithmic design generates architectural outputs based on numeric inputs; digital fabrication links architects directly to manufacturing processes and provides them opportunities to engage with materials in new ways; artificial intelligence and machine learning facilitates the design process; and some labour-intensive tasks in construction are now the target of automation (Kolarevic 2003; Picon 2010; Marble 2012; Bañón and Raspall 2020). We are now closer to the Bauhaus dream of unifying methods of mass production with artistic vision than ever before.

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, New York: Routledge (forthcoming).

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521), for instance, identifies the dual quality in the tectonic object as being simultaneously ontological and representational, which differentiated it from the technological object that ‘arises directly out of meeting an instrumental need’, and the scenographic object that ‘may be used equally to allude to an absent or hidden element’.

It is widely agreed that choices and treatments of building materials are essential in making and construction (Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi 2002; Brownell 2011; Forty 2012). What I would like to stress here is the dynamic and sometimes incompatible relationship between building materials and techne in history. The transformation of pagodas in China is an interesting example. When pagodas were initially introduced from ancient India, the Chinese considered that the form did not fit their aesthetic taste, nor did it go well with their timber constructive system (Zhai 1955: 55). Gradually, timber pagodas in Chinese style were developed based on local aesthetic preferences and ways of building.

After Six Dynasties (220–280), bricks were used for pagoda construction to prevent fire damage. The forms of brick pagodas, however, kept some features of the timber ones, and the formal incongruity continued for many generations before proper stereotomic forms were invented (ibid.). This example shows that changes in building materials and in techne do not always occur simultaneously. It may take many experiments to reach a suitable tectonic/technological solution; hybrid forms emerge during the transition from one material to another.

Labour is another important dimension of construction but has remained under-studied until recent years.

The effects of labour costs, labour availability, labour organization, and modes of workflow and collaboration upon architectural development are significant and sometimes decisive (Deamer and Bernstein 2010; Arantes 2019; Deamer 2020; Stephenson 2020. Despite the durability, strength, and visual attractiveness of natural stone, for example, stonemasonry was labour-intensive. As the Industrial Revolution disrupted the old labour system and new building materials arose, many handicraft workers lost their livelihood and the traditional craft of stonemasonry died out. Thus, when John Ruskin (1960) exalted the exquisiteness of sculptures in the stones of Venice to his 19th-century audience, he understood well that he was recommending what he could not obtain. By the mid-20th century, while consumer society demanded a less sterile built environment, it could no longer afford to ornament a building in ways matching

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Object-Oriented Ontology and Architectural Darkness Simon Weir Lecturer in Architecture: Design Philosophy

The Lotus Conceals At the southern end of Tokyo’s Ueno Park is Shinobazu Lotus Pond, 55 000m2 of lotus flowers. The lotuses completely cover the pond, you don’t see any water, only their light pink flowers set against wide, dark green leaves. It is uncanny to come to a pond and not see water.

You imagine it’s there, concealed beneath the surface.

Without the surface reflections that you always see in bodies of water, at night it is an unusually dark object. In the metropolis’ shining night, a pool of genuine darkness.

The Darkest Gallery At the northern end of Ueno Park is another remarkably dark space, Yoshio Taniguchi’s 1999 Gallery of Hōryūji Treasures. Turning off the road, the walkway is nestled into the shrubbery, beneath a closed canopy. The path ends at a square pond and you pause in the shade of the trees to look at the grey sunlit facade reflected in still water. The foyer is a long, tall rectangle, with a grey stone floor, and glazed on three facades, the fourth long northern wall is pale yellow-brown stone, sunlit near the translucent ceiling. You exit the foyer by turning right into an opening in the stone wall, into a small room clad in plywood. Here the mood is arrestingly different, like a fire in the cave on the side of a snowy mountain. The eastern wall of this small space holds a pair of glass doors. Pause and you will notice the glass doors are almost mirrors, and you see yourself. This moment of self-reflection can be rather startling. It is not merely that there is a glass door reflecting the light, but the reflected image is unusually sharp as the interior beyond is unusually dark.

Here you enter the short end of a long narrow room.

At the far end a staircase leading upwards to a skylight high above. Cabinets display ancient masks, but you have to wait for your eyes to adjust to the darkness to see the details. The wall opposite the second cabinet opens into an even darker room, our destination.

This dark exhibition hall hosts dozens of small, eighth century bronze Buddhist statues from the Hōryūji Temple in the former Japanese capital of Nara.1 The room

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Image credit: Simon Weir

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Hiroko McDermott, “The Hōryūji Treasures and Early Meiji Cultural Policy.”

Monumenta nipponica 61.3 (2006): 339–374.

2 Graham Harman, “The Third Table,” Documenta (13): 100 Notes - 100 Thoughts/100 Notizen - 100 Gedanken, (Hatje Cantz; Bilingual edition, August 31, 2012), 4.

3 Timothy Morton. Dark Ecology: for a Logic of Future Coexistence. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

4 Simon Weir, “Object Oriented Ontology and the Challenge of the Corinthian Capital” Make Sense 2020, (Harvest, Sydney, 2020), 114-116; Simon Weir and Graham Harman, “Architecture and Object-Oriented Ontology,” Architecture Philosophy, 6(1), 2021.

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is very dark, but in time you adjust. The walls are lustrous, almost luminous, clad in roughly polished copper whose blurred reflections lend the room an indistinct visual boundary. The copper imparts a unique warm hue, like a great fire burning brightly at a great distance. And like being caught in bushfire smoke, the ceiling is absent; there’s just darkness up there.

Photography is unable to convey the optical experience. Like the darkness of the Lotus Pond, there is a distinctly visual yet non-representational quality to this wondrous room. You won’t find photographs of this space on the internet. The Gallery of Hōryūji Treasures, doesn’t have a Wikipedia nor an Archdaily entry. There is a peaceful darkness here that eyes but not cameras enjoy.

Towards an ontography of darkness The Lotus Pond, a reprieve from the onslaught of city light, is a body of water hidden by spectacular natural display, hosting a dark ecology.3 The Gallery of Hōryūji Treasures deploys darkness to allow the ceiling, walls, and the outside world, to withdraw. Darkness is ontographic of infra-realism’s withdrawal of reality and the persistence of mystery. Architecturally, this withdrawal is also manifest in the separation of elements, with what I have called occasionalist tectonics.4 Lotuses separate water from sky, light and sound locks separate foyer from sanctuary. They are connectors and the suppressors of qualities, they sever relations, allowing each architectural space to have its own haecceity, its unique uniqueness. Only when separated from its milieu does the cloud assume an identity separate from its oceanic parent. Only when the sanctuary is separated from the ordinary can it accept its sacred task as host of a veiled reality. So a sanctuary like a gallery, a theatre, or a temple, is a veil pretending to veil, the ghost of a ghost, but nonetheless, a ghost that whispers.

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Mining object-oriented ontology for architectural precepts Object-oriented ontology (OOO) is an infra-realist ontology, where reality resides beneath experience. The notion that a hidden reality underlies our experience is the core of many myths and religions: the Tao cannot be named, the holy spirit cannot be perceived, Medusa’s face can only be seen in reflections; one way or another, reality is veiled. Art can reflect this veiling with actual veils, but the ontological veil cannot be removed.

Graham Harman’s 'third table' essay, written for the 2012 Documenta catalogue, sketched out OOO’s schema for extracting knowledge from objects: undermining and overmining.2 In undermining, objects are reduced to their origins and/or parts, eg. ethanol is C2H5OH. In overmining, objects are reduced to their purposes and/or effects, eg., ethanol gets you drunk.

While both statements are true, the philosophical catch is when these statements are taken literally and an ontology is implied. It is not exactly true that ethanol is C2H5OH, or that ethanol is for intoxication, however much this may be true for us. So, Harman’s three tables are the undermined table, the overmined table, and the table that is independent of any human perception, the third table that is withheld, hidden, dark.

Harman’s three tables also lays out of the basic formula of infra-realism: the external object, its observer, and the image or notion of the object generated by the observer. These three objects of perception in OOO are real object - sensual object - real object. During perception and causal interactions, a real object contacts only an abstraction, a fragment of the other real object.

The sensual object acts as a conveyance for one object’s qualities to contact the other object, but also effectively

limits and suppress the objects’ qualities involved in the interaction; just as a door connects two rooms it also places a limit on the objects that can pass between them.

OOO thereby suggests a rethinking of connections and passageways as spaces of understated complexity, as objects of agency.

An architectural example of this ontological idea is the light and sound lock separating a gallery’s inner sanctum, or a theatre’s performance space, from the brighter, noisier foyer. We usually describe the qualities of an architectural space as if the qualities are in the object, and materials add qualities, but the function of the light and sound lock is to remove qualities, to absorb and eliminate the visual, acoustic and thermal qualities of the adjoining spaces. They are the black holes of galleries and theatres. Usually they’re designed to be ignored, passed through without comment, the pause before the main event. Cinemas and theatres often have light and sound locks that are dark in colour with absorbent surfaces. Taniguchi’s solution is rather unique, making the visitor pause and notice their own image. Like stepping from a busy street into the antechamber of a cathedral, the quietness of a stone room, and its echoic quality, draw one’s attention to one’s own noisiness, and elicits a cautious quietude. Not only are these spaces inherently quiet, they also quieten. OOO helps us recognise that the point of contact between two objects is not a point, but an object to be designed.

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MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE

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Master of Architecture

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Semester 1

Semester 2

Architecture Studio 3 Coordinator Michael Tawa

Architecture Studio 3 Coordinator Simon Weir

Tutors Michael Tawa Catherine Lassen Peter Chivers

Tutors Simon Weir Mano Ponnambalam

Thesis Studio Coordinator Chris L Smith Tutors Chris L Smith Qianyi Lim Olivia Hyde

Thesis Studio Coordinator Duanfang Lu Tutors Duanfang Lu Gonzalo Valiente Oriol Jorge Valiente Oriol Sebastian Tsang

Rovelli, C., There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness (London: Allen Land, 2020).

2 Barnard, A., “Painful Memory for Muslims: Outrage Over a Proposed Islamic Center in Manhattan,” New York Times, September 11, 2021, https://www.nytimes. com/2021/09/11/nyregion/ muslim-islamic-center-9-11.html 1

The Copernican Power of Architecture

Paolo Stracchi Program Director, Master of Architecture

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On 6 January 1497, after six years studying in Italy at the University of Bologna, Dominus Nicolaus Kopperlingk de Thorn returned to Poland. A few years later, Copernicus (as he came to be known), in On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, shocked us with the revelation that we are not (at) the centre of the universe. Carlo Rovelli explained that Copernicus’s revolution began at the University of Bologna and in Italy. There, he grew his knowledge of books, explored his obsessions and developed the renaissance desire to innovate. Copernicus’s academic experience, immersed ‘in the very profound idea that knowledge can be transformed and become transformative’ was, according to Rovelli, the essence of what university should be: a place where we can use our youthful courage to question knowledge, move forward and change the world.1 Rovelli’s idea of university resonates with our newly launched, critical, experimental and engaged M.Arch program. Even during challenging times, such as the year just passed, our teachers and tutors tirelessly work to create inspiring design research studios. Students’ results, which are included in this catalogue, resonate with staff teaching efforts and are a tangible testimony of students’ passion, skill, resilience and creativity. Proudly, our MArch program offers an exciting way to think forward and, at last, perhaps, make a better world. However, does architecture have such power?

Can the design of good, meaningful buildings change the world? I cannot answer this for sure, but what I do know is that Copernicus actually did relatively very little: he moved—wrongly—the centre of the universe from Earth to the Sun. However, in so doing, he radically changed our perception of the universe, destabilising many. Somehow, at its core, architecture has that Copernican power. Indeed, the presence of architecture—the existence of a simple building—can be Copernican destabilision to the point that 20 years after 9/11, building an Islamic centre in New York is still not possible.2 And, if the absence of a building can indicate how much architecture can represent and divide, it is easy to imagine the power that its very presence may wield. Use caution.

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Boambilly Project Michael Tawa

Master of Architecture

Architecture Studio 3

This studio designs an intervention in the Boambilly Project, with two objectives: a. to improve the amenity of Boambilly as a recreational destination for visitors arriving by ferry and private craft; b. to provide an immersive experience that foregrounds the atmospheric qualities of Boambilly as a distinctive place in itself and within the harbour context.

Boambilly is one of fourteen islands in Sydney Harbour. Students undertook a detailed historical study of Boambilly and its role in the history of Sydney, beginning with First Nations culture, pre-colonial occupation/use of the islands and harbour, colonial history through to the current situation, with its authorised and unauthorised histories etc. With their intervention, students were asked to engage these multiple historical layers and take up a critical perspective on the relationships between them.

The key thematic framing for Boambilly was the concept of atmosphere, and related ideas of ambience and mood. Atmosphere can be understood in a preliminary sense through ways to trigger/unclench/produce emergent characteristics and through human engagement, affection, or haptic experiences. Designs were required to engage the extant atmosphere of the place and provide an infrastructure or apparatus/machine sensitive to the island’s situational conditions: one that could magnify/amplify/highlight/foreground those conditions through spatiality, temporality, and materiality.

Ariel Ophir-Verheyden, ‘Boambilly Rooms’. Boambilly is an ordered landscape in the tradition of the picturesque. The park and controlled landscape design is one rooted in modernity and disconnected from ancient cultures. The island is re-imagined as a place for contemporary performance and discovery, with spaces capturing and enhancing unique

47 and discomforting atmospheres. The carving into the sandstone, located on the island, links to the historic quarrying of sandstone around the Sydney basin. Interventions are not visible until one enters the island. The spaces are interlinked with light, prevailing winds and controlled tides to connect visitors to place, whilst disorienting them.

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(L) Kirrili Zimmer, ‘Of the Mind’. Drawing on the simple act of awareness to connect people to the land and to each other, this project developed out of two questions: Is objective information external to the mind? Can subjective information be factual? Research of local indigenous culture revealed a complex system of survival techniques generated through consistent observation of elements. This knowledge, passed on through mnemonics & Songlines for over 60,000 years, relies solely on human memory, an innately subjective concept. This project is an opportunity to re-introduce the practice of awareness – of people, place and our history, to watch over, learn from and protect.

(R) Emily Malek, ‘A Tale of Resistance’. Boambilly is a tenuous place ­– a slither of land on the edge of land and water, of emergence and submergence, of the tame and wild. In Gadigal language, Boambilly means ‘blow-do’, referring to wind as a primary actor in the landscape.

Boambilly heralds a tale of resistance, against tectonic forces and human intervention. Yet at only 8.5m above sea level, the island will soon become consumed by water. Through four large scale instruments embedded into the site, the vibratory movements of wind, tide, current and earth are amplified to create a dialogue between the island and the listener.

The instruments create a series of warped melodies, the swan song for Boambilly, before it slips beneath the sea, taken by the rising tide.

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Living in the City (House as Experiment) Catherine Lassen

Master of Architecture

Architecture Studio 3

This studio invites participants to critically consider a series of experimental late modern houses in Sydney to explore strategic implications for civic architecture in the city. From Le Corbusier’s villas of the 1920s to Koolhaas’ ‘Y2K’ project at the end of the 20th century, architects have designed private houses as testing grounds for strategies later extended in larger, public projects. Architects’ own homes have frequently focused such investigative attitudes and offered lenses through which to suggest a way of life.

Students commenced with research into three houses: • Buhrich House II, Castlecrag (1972) • Leplastrier/Lambert House, Lovett Bay (1994) • Murcutt/Lewin House, Mosman (2003) Located on Sydney’s North Shore, these architects’ homes were chosen for their conceptual and material precision, considered connection to a wider environment and attention to an embodied ethos. Students’ close readings analysed key relationships and presented conditions that supported an imagined life in the dwelling. Framed by architectural priorities developed in these investigations, each student proposed a public intervention on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour.

External site visits/lectures supported the explorations: • Visit and lecture by Leplastrier: Leplastrier/Lambert house, Lovett Bay. • Visit: three public projects by Richard Leplastrier with lectures by Leplastrier: Volunteer Firefighters Memorial, Mrs Macquaries Chair (2001); Amenities Building, Georges Heights and Georges Heights Lookout (both 2004-6).

• Visit and lecture by Leplastrier: Shark Island.

• Lecture by Peter John Cantrill: Tafuri: City as Theatre.

• Lecture by Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal Living in the City, Rothwell Symposium.

Mackenzie Nix, ‘Vessels’. ‘Vessels’ proposes to re-commission the dry docks of Cockatoo Island. These docks are integrated with the current dominant program of the island as a centre for the arts, achieved through alterations to existing infrastructure that don’t compromise a return to industrial use. Both cultural-social cradle and a literal vessel, a mobile,

51 catamaran-like theatre is proposed, one that is able to arrive and depart from atop the sliding caisson of Sutherland Dock. As it navigates the storied waters of Sydney Harbour, the theatre enters into the history and myth of Sydney, providing a means of escape as it brings forth alternate, unreachable worlds.

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(L) Jerry Feng, ‘Sutherland Dockyard’. A simple intervention that awakens the dramatic nature of Cockatoo Island, this project investigates how architecture should respond and reinforce value within an existing site. By introducing simple architectural archetypes, such as platforms, columns and walls, the program utilises the heritage cranes and dry dock gate to be participants of a new architecture, changing its function into a public plaza, pavilion, theatre, gallery, museum and memorial. From afar, the only visible addition to the site is a roof with four columns. The design does not strive to impress – it hopes to remain humble and allow new possibilities to occur naturally.

(R) Liat Busqila, ‘Living in the City’. Drawn analysis of Sydney Harbour describes an endless line of undulating bays and headlands; a site of changing use and continuous reformation of shoreline. Parallel conditions are observed at Cockatoo Island, where multiple overlapping functions have been re-inscribed and written-over. Via precise cuttings and additions, a new headland is articulated along the north-east apron.

Cardinal orientations intersect existing alignments to reconfigure the arrival sequence and connect a series of newly programmed jetties. A network of platforms suspended between water and sky, these jetties imagine a way of living in the city in a common infrastructure. The design employs a level of strategic open-endedness, promoting freedom of use.

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(L) Tynan Jayne, ‘Echoes of the Veil’. Exploring thematics of erasure, the proposition seeks to rebind the fragments of Boambilly through a violent yet delicate incision that reveals the scars of intervention and repair this forgotten landscape. The intrusion scrutinises the nature of concealing and revealing place through a covering or gauze, represented here by the veil of harbour water. Allowing the architecture to succumb to the veil, it becomes a reminder of Boambilly’s history in the harbours topography.

Like the flooding of the river valley the architectural landscape of the intervention transforms – spaces take on new importance and past connections are concealed with tidal surges.

(R) Sophie Calberg, ‘Boambilly Baths’. Boambilly is an exposed island with a history that can be seen in its contours and edges above and below sea level. The Boambilly Baths is a meditative approach to the site’s landscape history, taking advantage of existing materials and rock shelves to create spaces that cut into the earth and encourage us to reflect closely on materiality and how time can, and has, changed these materials.

Allowing the natural elements to weather, erode and shape the existing island’s landscape and the baths themselves, the spaces initially created allow a gradual, ever-changing atmosphere and form, continually adding to its history.

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Harbour Bath Chris L Smith

Master of Architecture

Thesis Studio

In an interview titled ‘Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium’ the philosopher Gilles Deleuze suggests: All societies are rational and irrational at the same time. They are perforce rational in their mechanisms, their cogs and wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they assign to the irrational ... It’s like theology: everything about it is rational if you accept sin, immaculate conception, incarnation. Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but a region traversed by the irrational and defined only by a certain type of relation between irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift.1 It is this negotiation of the field of delirium that the present project focuses upon.

The Harbour Bath project is an opportunity to explore, elaborate, extend and experiment in the zone of indiscernibility; in a drift between liquids, landscapes, architectures and the bodies.

Students design a public bathing space in Sydney harbour. Liquids within liquids. The project is an experiment in harbouring human bodies: the technical and techniques of architectural mechanisms, cogs and wheels, and connecting systems.

Also experimenting in bathing: the relation of irrational factors, the drift, as Gilles said ‘we bathe in delirium’.2

(Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari , ‘Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium’, Chaosophy, ed. Sylvere Lothringer, Autonomedia/Semiotexte (1995)).

2 (Gilles Deleuze, ‘Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 43.)

1

Ali Megahed, ‘Empathy’. For a particular moment of time during the year the sun will be low enough in the sky at sunset to cast a silhouette of Fort Denison that this harbour pool proposal seeks to make use of. Drawing on a mnemonic attachment that will develop through the fall of shadow off

57 and away from the island, the fort’s silhouette is positioned as a reference point where the sun’s glare sheds its depth, context and textural quality, leaving in its void the spatial frame in which a rhythmic motif of the sun’s reflection in the perceived immaterial is foregrounded.

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(L) Daisy Little, ‘A Lure for Feeling’. We as humans unconsciously accumulate ‘data’ from the real world, which act as the subliminal seeds of ideas and perceptions – affecting one mentally and physically. These subliminal moments have been described as intuition, a gut feeling or, as philosopher Alfred North Whitehead termed it, prehension. The baths are designed to strip away the preconceived notions we have of architecture and bathing areas by manipulation of the architectural element. Keeping the occupant within a realm of intuitive experience slows down the exploration of the Esher-like baths. It turns their focus inward and to the present time rather than the constant and tiring distractions of the busy outside

world. (R) Hamish Bresnahan, ‘Zeno’s Baths’. Once a colonial fort, and before that a place of escape and resort, the island of Mat-e-wan-ye has always resisted the flow of time and its acceleration. To create a bastion of infinite moments, a single barge brings all materials necessary for construction. Once aground, a formal typology is decided by the reach of the crane fitted permanently to the barge, through a system of unfurling hinged steel plates in which the construction process is immortalised.

Once all items have been positioned and installed, the 80-metre sail is swept by the crane to conceal the island and provide spatial separation for ocean swimming.

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Hall to Hubbub Qianyi Lim

Master of Architecture

Thesis Studio

At the heart of the Western city lies the Town Hall – emblematic of 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. With recent social and technological changes, along with the pressure arising from the pandemic, it brings 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?

This studio speculates on the town hall as a new civic hub of innovation, exploring the potential for all citizens to determine the future of their city through participation and production. It investigates what it means to innovate by first referring to precedents in practice across the material, cultural and technological before looking at everyday social practices.

The site is the Sydney Town Hall, a 19th century colonial edifice on George Street in the heart of the CBD. The site has seen considerable change and will continue to evolve under future plans for a new town hall square. The Hall to Hubbub studio addresses the site’s immediate and long-term future, challenging the existing fabric of the building and making a greater urban proposition.

Maddison Brown, ‘Gu-ru-gal: A long time back’. We understand and locate ourselves within a city based almost solely on our roads. Roads represent the logic of colonial cities. Similarly, Country can be understood and navigated by tracks: leading you through a place, connecting individual experiences and spaces. The idea behind the intervention at the Sydney Town Hall is to make these tracks visible; they define our city

61 and yet are absent in our current built environment. Through a series of interventions, the redevelopment of the Sydney Town Hall building and the adjacent site decolonises what originally symbolised colonial power and civic progress. It should create a public gathering space to share Indigenous culture and knowledge for the educational benefit of all.

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(L) Katniss Kwong, ‘Regenerative Incubator’. The project aims to use algae as an architectural tool to regenerate wastewater into filtered water. The project hopes to educate the public on the issue of waste regeneration by allowing them to witness the regeneration process. After the wastewater is converted, the by-products of seaweed can be used to make handicrafts, accessories, clothes and food, thereby promoting the innovative cultural industries and spurring ecological development in Greater Sydney. (R) Hannah Lupton, ‘Resculpt’. This project, an Exploratory Garden and Research Laboratory, grounded on the Gadigal land of the Eora nation, centres around the interaction between humans

and natural elements of Country. The immersion of individuals within native flora and sculpted flowing forms, derived from first contact, recounts the gracefully meandering paths formed within traditional Aboriginal sacred spaces, and aims to incite a sense of rediscovery – awakening care for Country and self, with increased awareness of the practical applications of native plant species within a contemporary context. Blending the public and private boundaries within the garden and reimagined laboratories enhances the connection between the individual and the natural world.

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Peripheral Vision Olivia Hyde

Master of Architecture

Thesis Studio

The outlying areas of Greater Sydney are rarely discussed with love by the design professions. But a closer look reveals a complex and intriguing place with its own unique qualities and contradictions. Physically, this is an environment where a line of remnant Cumberland Plain bushland may meet a market garden, major infrastructure, light industry, and a new housing development, all within a 500m zone. Beneath this lies a varied but subtle landscape of undulating hills and myriad creek systems, site of the oldest agriculture in the world. Country is strong here, in landscape, in language and in people. On top of this, Western Sydney is now one of the most culturally diverse regions on the planet.

The new second airport for Sydney is now under construction and draft ‘precinct plans’ have been drawn up for development in the surrounding areas. New roads, rail lines, parks, housing, and commercial and industrial areas. What are the special qualities of this place that we should cherish and amplify in the face of this enormous change? How, as designers, can we truly challenge the vast standardising pressures of big finance to create distinctive and responsive places? This studio seeks to find the poetic and the beautiful, the unexpected and the bizarre, the profound and the ancient in our own urban backyard, and to generate an architecture both appro­priate and critical in response.

Emily Flanagan, ‘Time Swallow’. This project explores the preservation of Luddenham’s village character in the face of encirclement by the Western Sydney Aerotropolis. It is proposed that preservation is not merely a conservation of isolated built forms, but a comprehensive response to place as a layered and evolving entity. The focus is on Luddenham’s high

65 street where a series of section cuts are designed to include the re-appropriation of existing structures and the introduction of modest interventions to promote intensification of activity and interaction with the street. This pattern of occupation acts as a catalyst for gradual rejuvenation and examines issues of authenticity in promoting a spatial identity.

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(L) Lok See Wai, ‘Blue Grains’. The design aims to blend the architecture as a part of the natural experience in finding the creek. The Badgery’s Creek region in Western Sydney will be developed into an industrial region in close proximity to Western Sydney Airport. The scheme suggests an alternative typology of industrial buildings as opposed to the proposed ‘typical grid’ planning system. The typology responds delicately to the existing context whereby existing structures like prime farmland, roads and houses are conserved and are adaptively reused. The permeability of rammed earth blocks allows a microclimate to emerge and creates a unique landscape identity around each block. (R) Chun Yan Lim,

‘Seasonal City’. Inspired by Barcelona’s ‘superblocks’, this project proposes a car-free city block that challenges Western Sydney’s current precinct plan, which has an extensive, grid-like vehicular road system that accumulates up to 30% of the land. The proposal shifts cars to the fringe of each superblock, introducing smaller building units, narrower streets and wildlife corridors that meander along the site contours. It aims to weave the ecological nature into urban life, embracing the Aboriginals’ six seasons through the succession of vegetation in an endless cycle of growth, decay and renewal. It rejects the notion of zoning, mixing uses to encourage spontaneous human activities in and between the buildings.

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Art Gallery of NSW, 2050: Theatre-Museum of Atmospheric Art Simon Weir, Mano Ponnambalam

Master of Architecture

Architecture Studio 3

The visual identity of The Art Gallery of NSW has been long tied to the glorious golden sandstone facade by Walter Liberty Vernon, designer of the Mitchell Library, Central Railway Station and the Anderson Stuart Building at The University of Sydney. Although the Gallery has been renovated several times in the 120 years since, these changes have not altered its public face.

After a century of visual stability, the Sydney Modern project is the Gallery’s largest and most transformative project. An invited competition in 2013 was won

by Japanese minimalists Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates (SANAA) with their Australian partner Architectus, and the project is set to open next year. Seeing the Gallery engage in this self-transformation, this studio invites students to conceive of the next phase, a yet more radical, 2050 extension with a Theatre-Museum of Atmospheric Art. In the aesthetic philosophy of object-oriented ontology, all art is theatrical, because we must engage with art to activate its affects, hence a theatre-museum.

The object-oriented ontology’s infra-realism insists that art’s illusion of openness is a reminder of the withdrawn closure of reality while acknowledging its presence beneath perception. Artful architecture’s impossible task is making invisible reality appear visible, to help us somehow sense what is beyond sensation.

Our thanks to Dr Michael Brand, Director of AGNSW, Simone Bird, Head of Public Affairs at AGNSW, Nicholas Elias, Associate at Architectus, Dr Niko Tiliopoulos, from the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney, and award winning architect, Drew Heath, for assisting us in this project.

(L) Laura Payne, ‘Precinct of Cinematic Art’. The Precinct of Cinematic Art is a public gathering space, park, framed civic space and large volume for installations. The project seeks to unify and extend the parkland of the Domain, Art Gallery of NSW and Sydney Modern Gallery precinct and Woolloomooloo by pulling the Domain landscape over the Eastern Distributor. Situated upon and within this new ground are two new

69 elements: a black-box cinema, a transformative space that develops a unique experience through phenomena of space, light and form. And the Void Tower, a space beyond human scale accommodating monumental installation art, designed to inspire and challenge perceptions of volume and space.

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(L) Dani Filler, ‘Yanco’. Yanco is the Wiradjuri word for the ‘Song of Running Water’. This reinforces the notion of the creek that previously swept through Woolloomooloo and allows the building to act as an educational tool. The Art Gallery Extension both challenges and reclaims the notion of a gallery as a box with four walls: this proposal is comprised of a series of boxes where the program is interlinked, employing the notion of mereology and amodal completion. It is comprised of rammed earth, collected from the existing fabric of the site and beyond, and exhibited in such way that allows the user to pass through the broader Sydney scale.

Oyster shells are freed from the fate of land fill and integrated into the building to create a glimmering effect. (R) Max Jeffreys, ‘Sydney Modern 2050 – Woolloomooloo’. My project looks at the potential for the expansion of The Art Gallery of NSW in 2050. It sets out to extend permanent and temporary exhibition, performance and conference spaces over three volumes cascading down the slope of the Botanical Gardens towards Woolloomooloo Bay and extend the Art Gallery’s reach from within the container of the park to make art more accessible to more people.

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(L) San David, ‘Art Gallery 2050’. The focus is to design a building that can be a direct extension of SANAA’s proposal for the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2050. The building would focus on having dedicated spaces to exhibit 2D art forms, 3D sculptures, interactive and performance-based art forms. The building design should meet the spatial and functional requirements needed to enhance the quality of the exhibits on display. The design should focus on sustainability and strive to develop a highly flexible system able to accommodate a variety of exhibits of varying nature and sizes. (R) Anirudha Agara, ‘The Flux’. The Flux is a 2050 proposal for the Theatre-Museum of Atmospheric Art. The museum

oscillates between reality and illusion leaving a thin line to be explored by the audience to distinguish between fact and fiction. Inspirations are drawn from works of Archigram, Superstudio and tied with the theory of object-oriented ontology. Generative adverserial networks (GANs) are deployed to generate unique textures, tectonics, and imagery based on a dataset containing hundreds of aboriginal artworks cross pollinated with modern forms of art. While the project extensively uses pragmatic technology and approaches, it still eludes conventions and provokes speculative desires.

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Heterotopias of Connectedness: Gender, Sexuality and the Body Duanfang Lu

Master of Architecture

Thesis Studio

Since the COVID-19 outbreak last year, we have been living in an unprecedented unfolding of events. Alongside lockdowns, empty streets and daily reports of infection statistics are people experiencing increasing loneliness and disconnection, with members of marginalised social groups being disproportionately impacted. There are calls for care beyond mere survival: care based on connectedness.

This studio explores architecture as critical infrastructure of radical connectedness by rethinking heterotopia to address contemporary issues of difference and identity associated with gender and sexuality. Students create heterotopia(s) of connectedness, which allow marginalised bodies to exist free from fear and violence, to be accepted as equally viable bodies, and to flourish with mutual support and recognition.

The design is a City Centre for Gender and Sexuality to support women and the LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual) community and to deepen societal awareness of issues related to gender and sexuality by advancing an alternative architectural approach to the renewal of the Goulburn Street parking station. They go beyond the conceptualisations of gender and sexuality as binary categories to investigate the interaction between the body and space, and to explore the possibilities of making new places for empowerment based on contemporary debates around gender, sexuality, identity, subjectivity and the body.

Vania Alverina and Rainee Wu, ‘The City of The Flâneuse’. The concept of the flâneur, (a 19th century symbolic archetype for the urban, modernist experiences) is a solitary ‘wanderer’ in the public sphere, acting as both as the participant and the spectator of modern society—however, traditionally depicted only as male. It was not until 21st-century criticism and discussion under gender studies that the female equivalent of the flâneur was proposed—the flâneuse. From deep-rooted social and politically gendered stratifications of society, constrained by a patriarchal lens, the

75 architecture reframes the previously held male-dominant perspectives of the urban fabric and, instead, reveals the potentialities of the city as sites that entice the female with dreams of liberty and power. Hence, by reforming the rigid, rationale, and ‘masculine’ preconceptions of the city, the female experiences which have been previously neglected and suppressed in our historical narratives can be exposed, allowing the flâneuse to ultimately gain liberation within the city.

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(L) Yushi Yang, ‘Honeymoon Hotel Heterotopia’. This project focuses on designing a heterotopian architecture with a discussion on body-space-nature connectedness. The design is an oceanfront honeymoon hotel village located in North Head, Sydney. It is an attempt to actualise a romantic and sensual architectural space on a site with rich heterotopia heritages and ideal nature connectedness. The design has been developed in the belief that architecture is not an isolated object on the site and people are not in the space, but of the space. Aiming to make the hotel village an experiential heterotopian space with communal body-architecture-nature relationship, such approaches have been applied as juxtaposing heterotopias, super-positioning time and space,

and blurring boundaries. (R) William Wu and Vicky Xia, ‘Architecture for Protest’. Although demonstration is an effective way of expressing political attitudes, particularly for social minorities, and for social managers to receive diverse ideas, the complex regulations are often seen as an impediment that restricts and prevents some demonstrations from taking place. The scheme focused on the demands and activities of human expression and behaviour such as occupation and marching across significant demonstration events in Sydney history; considered the limitations of the existing protests; combined spatial and material elements to propose an architecture that empowers the voice of minority in society.

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Embracing the Black Cloud: A Tale of Two (Ideal) Cities Gonzalo Valiente Oriol

Master of Architecture

Thesis Studio

A transpacific ‘black cloud’ provoked by the 2019 Australian bushfires turns into a mythological beast at the exact instant when its toxic anthropogenic fumes blend with the teargas particles and barricade smoke emitted during Chile’s recent civil uprising.

It converts the oceanic gap between the cities of Sydney (sieged by the cosmopolitical revenge of Australia’s burnout environments) and Valparaiso (fighting to death for its eternally lost dignity) into an agonic battlefield for the future. The metaphor of the cloud unveils a violent confrontation between two mythological conceptions of ‘The End’, each one, represented by the unfolding of events hosted simultaneously by either city. Sydney’s shy civil and institutional response to the threat of the most destructive bushfires in Australia’s documented history embodies the end of what Chantal Moufe calls ‘the political’ and, with it, the end of planetary life as we know it. On the other end, Valparaiso’s citizen takeover of the streets, monuments and institutions, epitomises the resuscitation of ‘the political’.

This studio engages with the architectural tradition of designing and theorising sacred precincts and ideal/utopian cities. Students embrace one mythological conception of ‘The End’ (post-political or post-capitalist) and transform a delimitated area of their associated city (Sydney or Valparaiso, respectively) into urban sanctuaries: heterotopic crystallisations of the relations between power structures, political imaginaries (or ideologies) and built environments. Additionally, they conceptualise and design (at least) one institutional architecture meant to reflect the foundational aspirations of their embraced unearthing or burial of ‘the future’.

Gabriella Lindsay, Alice Mao and Daniela Whitelaw, ‘Sydney Interrupted’. In an effort to protect the safe imaginaries of Australia’s ‘Lucky-Country’ mythology from all sorts of alterity, strict governance dominates the atmospheric agendas and urban landscapes of Sydney. It contributes to a fragile socio-ecological system which struggles to survive in an exhausted environment. This project questions how speculative

79 practices in the field of design might uncover the true extent of disruption and consider how the non-human might evolve to overcome the human in response to its destruction. How might atmospheric and symbolic languages shift the essence of urban space towards greater acceptance of the non-human and of otherness?

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(L) Spiros Spyrou, ‘Condición de Contemplació’. The assault of capitalism on our everyday lives has defined ‘time’ itself as a monetised agent that infects contemporary society. The project aims to explore ways in which a possibility for change through the political coexistence between action and contemplation of a collective society can be integrated within the institutional framework of a knowledge institution.

The aim is to challenge the preconceived notion of knowledge production attached to education institutions through a heterotopian environment that allows the concept of ‘slow’ learning to infect the citizens and provide an avenue for a joyful life that is given time to breathe and mature. (R) Matthew Aylmer, ‘The Temple of Negativity’. Colonisation and globalisation have established a moral and aspirational system that subjects bodies, territories, and social structures to dogmatic naturalisations of

hyperproductivity. It is driven by the individualist need to impose the ‘self’ onto the ‘other’ as a way of symbolically negating the omnipresent threat of death. Our blind faith in the subsequent processes of extraction and development has resulted in planetary ecological catastrophe and the formation of hegemonies subjugating and dispossessing the unproductive and unfamiliar. While death may have been negated at an individual level, it has been outsourced to the collective ‘other’. Intersecting architecture, philosophy, and political theory, the project transforms Sydney’s Town Hall into a temple for encounters between the living and the dead, returning death to the heart of the city. Through this intervention, it speculates on the generation of new mythologies eroding the obligation of hyperproductivity and introducing a system of reciprocity between life and death.

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The Pilbara’s Interregnum, a Time of Monsters Jorge Valiente Oriol

Master of Architecture

Thesis Studio

Since the first Anglo-Saxon ‘explorations’ of the Pilbara – only 160 years ago – the region has existed as a spatiotemporal battlefield of colonial exploitation, expulsions, and explosions. With the increasing investments in automated technologies and fly-in-fly-out urbanism that connects mine pits, airports, detonated sites, railways, ports, pipes, and tourist playgrounds, it enables the telematic administration of ‘optimisation’ and ‘efficiency’.

Meanwhile, the necessary, time-consuming, and messy democratic debate over the common good is displaced in the name of ‘profit’. Still drilled for its vast oil, gas and iron ore deposits, the Pilbara appears today as a significant global reserve of rare-earth minerals and lithium. Recently discovered deposits of these coveted metals – along with a privileged exposure to wind, sun, and strategic access to the oceans – have positioned the region at the core of another major geopolitical struggle: the global energetic transition. As a result, new stakeholders rush to hoard the sources of ‘green-gold’ and to become the new lords of a decarbonised energetic regime, thus perpetuating the battlefield condition of the region.

Beyond the commonplace of architecture as a ‘toolkit-of-solutions,’ this studio proposes a fictional takeover of the Pilbara while embracing the messiness of the spatiotemporal battlefield as a ‘site condition,’ which requires critical evaluation and immediate actions. Moving away from a battlefield driven by the search of resources towards a battlefield in which to test alternative imaginaries, students explore forms of appropriation and profanation as means to construct counter-narratives and new critical mythologies.

Caitlin Condon, ‘Mine of Monsters and Memories’. Located on Eastern Guruma Country, the design re-imagines Rio Tinto’s Marandoo mine to transform mining as a national building endeavour towards the re-engaging acts of mourning and cultural reparation as a national building endeavour. ‘Monsters have a double meaning; they help us to pay attention to the ancient chimeric entanglements; [and] they point us towards the monstrosities of man.’ (Tsing, 2017) The project re-appropriates

83 Marandoo’s existing program to mine erased memories and unearth the monsters amongst and within us. Archives, galleries, living museums, performance spaces and cemeteries all come together as a theatre of Gaia where multiple practices of knowing come together to un-know; and collaborations with those other-than-human tell stories of living entanglements.

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(L) Marco Pecora, ‘Harrowing Walls’. Harrowing Walls for Nomadic Futures is an allegoric city which responds to the colonial and extractive legacy of Minderoo with a prioritisation on serving alterity. This alterity includes both the human and the more-than-human, from the Thalanyji peoples to the grey nomads, from the camel to Wanamangurra or the Ashburton river. The project assumes the closure and reoccupation of the existing Minderoo cattle station, owned by billionaire iron magnate Andrew Forrest. Lead by the rights of nature movement, the Ashburton river has been recognised with personhood, thus the city represents a sovereign zone owned by the river itself. (R) James Feng, ‘Restaging

Gaïa’s Horizons’. In a time where landscape horizons are occupied by megascale conveyor belt infrastructures of the natural resources extraction economy, territories are suffocated in slow violence. The unrelenting rhythm of Port Hedland, the world’s largest bulk export port, is the epicentre of a visceral theatre of massive and massless technology.

In this virally disfiguring battlefield, how can the city’s value be unlearned and recomposed into new possibilities? This project proposes an alternative urbanism, by drawing from early Surrealist notions of pluralism, Bruno Latour’s ‘Gaïa theatres’ and Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘carnivalesque’ to restage through critical monuments, mythologies and territorial pantomimes.

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The Uncertainty of Program – Reacting to Displacement Sebastian Tsang

Master of Architecture

Thesis Studio

Living our daily lives and going about our day-to-day activities, we bounce between our familiar spatial bubbles. It is undeniable that our fluid requirements of space only become more frequent and dynamic. A row of sleepy shops can quickly become compartments of living claimed by a few hundred residents. Even as children, we subconsciously claim and displace space through our sofa-cushion forts and assign invisible borders in playground corners, which are only to be dismantled after the games are over. In our global developed metropolises, skyward towers and sprawling construction consume space around them, invoking an involuntary and unstable motion of space. This spatial displacement in the literal sense extends to themes of urban sprawl; globalisation; migratory and nomadic movement; the destruction of the natural environment. Do we need to resign to a conception of “lost” space? How are we to uncover these displaced spaces through our craft of architecture?

This studio explores multiple layers of spatial meanings and coding beyond that of a physical or superficial nature through investigative research and discursive exploration. Sites imbued with contested spatial dilemmas will be targeted in the hope of unravelling a set of conditions eager for tectonic input. Students are encouraged to interject, expose, entangle, with one proposition: any preordained reckless program needs to be suspended to avoid playing the hypocrite and succumbing to the forces that have caused displacement in the first place.

Serena Bomze and Alex Zeng, ‘Finding Home, with The Tōhoku Manor’. This project investigates the rebuilding of identities and moments of the people affected by the events of the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami. The culminating architectural response imagines an animated dynamic dwelling that traverses the Japanese landscape, that assists the collectively displaced in rebuilding their lost ‘webs’ of spatial memories

87 and qualities that uniquely define their home. ‘Finding Home’ culminates in the physical form of a highly unique dwelling – its architecture takes on elements from each town it passes through, growing and shrinking along the journey. It is tailored to its people, both spatially temporal and permanent, strongly inspired by Japanese culture.

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(L) Chantelle Noorizadeh and Stefano di Lorenzo, ‘Complexity & Architecture’. How can we navigate violence of the atonal world brought about through the imposition of a hylomorphic order? Throughout this process it inherently renders complexities into simplicities, and we find ourselves bound by assimilation. How can architecture, through innovation and representation, loosen the death grip on unreal superimpositions and amplify a voice for complexity, failure, reality, being and event?

Through genealogical determinations of title, nepotism and class, the agency of the architect oscillates between imposed creative privilege and acquiescent receptivity, giving rise to a homogenisation of our built environment. Can architectural discourse embrace the rhizome of or

urban streetscapes, to centre the agency of the architect? (R) Ania Lloyd Jones, ‘Sydney: A Biking City’. After my sister was hit by a car earlier this year while biking, and the deaths of four delivery riders within two months in 2020, Sydney streets continue to be hostile environments. This project reimagines Sydney as an idyllic cycling city and uses imagined pieces of cycling infrastructure to transform streets into worlds in which these accidents may never have happened. Through different urban moves, this project transforms public space allowing people to gain a more interactive, sensory, and social environment. What Sydney streets are used for can be completely reconsidered when we design for people, not just for motor vehicles.

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Student List

Master of Architecture

Semester 1

Semester 2

Architecture Studio 3 Coordinator Michael Tawa

Thesis Studio Coordinator Chris L Smith

Architecture Studio 3 Coordinator Simon Weir

Thesis Studio Coordinator Duanfang Lu

Michael Tawa Jacob Ainsworth Kirrili Egan Greg Kim Emily Malek Natalie Murray Ariel Ophir-Verheyden William Sutcliffe Linda Tran Ricky Ye

Chris L Smith Hamish Bresnahan Charlotte Bryant Xuan Ji Shervin Jivani Jin Kyung Kim Rebecca Kwok Daisy Little Ali Megahed Alyssa Mengsha Hugh Roberts Haochen Zhang

Simon Weir & Mano Ponnambalam Anirudha Agara Ruksaar Begum Yin Chun John Chan Millicent Curtis San David Xuqian Duan Danielle Filler Shehzad Jeevaji Maxwell Jefferys Calioppe Kefalas Wing Kiu Lau Esther Liem Xavier Logan Yishan Lu Celine Noviany Laura Payne Alexander Prichard Manjiri Sane Anna Shen Connor Tan Kah Kei Aldrich Tan Ghounwa Tawk Prarthana Thirunarayanan Harry Tse Damien Wilmotte Samantha Yau York Yu Ni Zheng

Duanfang Lu Vania Alverina Samvit Bhanot Archibald Cao Yi Cao Yue Feng Lingjie Gan Amber Lin Tethys Nan Arjun Pariyarath Elisa Pesch Vivan Sanghvi Clara Shi Jui Varghese Regina Wang Rainee Wu William Wu Vicky Xia Jinsong Xian Ivan Xu Yushi Yang Dominic Zhang Yaxin Zhu

Catherine Lassen Liat Busqila Thomas Chen Charles Cummins Rohan Downs Xinyuan Feng Brij Gohel Vanessa Li Mackenzie Nix Alice Parle Yue Wang Tina Yun Peter Chivers Sophie Carlberg Foram Chauhan Miriam Enderby Joyeeta Iqbal Tynan Jayne Chen Li Amal Meemeduma Jawad Samrani Tammy Tanakulthon Milan Vukicevic Jing Yan Shuting Yang Yiqian Zhao

Qianyi Lim Maddison Brown Raymond Cho Sebastian Chu Jack Dumanat Aayushi Gajjar Katniss Kwong Myat Hsu Mon Kyaw Hannah Lupton Qingdong Meng Samuel Murray Ria Musale Christopher Zeng-Allen Olivia Hyde Sam Bailey Darrin Chen Stephanie Cheung Ali Fadam Emily Flanagan Christie Foo Rosemarie Gray Chun Yan Lim Anna Osipova Aria Sun Lok See Wai Tiffany Yick

Gonzalo Valiente Oriol Matthew Aylmer Kirankumar Babu Pragya Bharati Liam Brandwood Kelly Drenth Natalie Dungey Tricia Gillett Bec Gordon Anastasia Guan Leah Kouper Gabriella Lindsay Alice Mao Jia Ning Lucy Sharman Spiros Spyrou William Stephenson Tsz Kwong Marco Tong Daniella Whitelaw Jessica Whitlock

Jorge Valiente Oriol Shiyu Cao Jackie Chen Caitlin Condon James Feng Alex Forbes Rojin Keshavarzi Wen Liang Marco Pecora Chelsea Peng Alex Volfman Isabella Yu Jinyi Zhang Natasha Zhong Ladan Zolfaghari Sebastian Tsang Kai Adair Mai Alarilla Luke Austin Serena Bomze Anthony Bucciarelli Max Cha Jessica Cho Jasmine Xiaofei Deng Marion Edye Viola Huang Ania Lloyd Jones Grace Lee Vivian Liang Stefano Di Lorenzo Sweta Susan Mathew Chantelle Noorizadeh Sabrina Pasic Lisa Xiao-Lei Shao Himashiny Sukumar Alex Zeng

External Contributors and Guest Critics Semester 1 Architecture Studio 3

Semester 2 Architecture Studio 3

Michael Tawa (Boambilly Project) Ross Anderson, USYD Victoria King, Hill Thalis Architecture + Urban Projects Thierry Lacoste, Lacoste + Stevenson Sophie Lanigan, USYD Lian Loke, USYD Matthew Mindrup, USYD Vesna Trobec, Studio Trobec

Simon Weir & Mano Ponnambalam Dr Michael Brand, Art Gallery of NSW Simone Bird, Art Gallery of NSW Drew Heath, Drew Heath Architecture Associates Dr Niko Tiliopoulos, USYD Nicholas Elias, Architectus Andre Frino, Darkside Architecture Nigel Greenhill, Greenhill Li Architects Kah-Fai Lee, John Wardle Architects

Catherine Lassen (Living in the City) Peter John Cantrill, City of Sydney Laura Harding, Hill Thalis Architecture + Urban Projects Richard Lepastrier, Architect Thesis Studio

Qianyi Lim (Hall to Hubbub) Amelia Borg, Sibling Architecture Nicholas Braun, Sibling Architecture Casey Bryant, TRIAS Kate Goodwin, USYD Andrea Lam, Sibling Architecture Timothy Moore, Sibling Architecture Eleanor Peres, Sibling Architecture Dagmar Reinhardt, USYD Hannah Slater, Infrastructure NSW Olivia Hyde (Peripheral Vision) Darlene van der Breggen, Sydney Olympic Park Authority Kate Goodwin, USYD Philip Graus, Greater Sydney Commission Carol Marra, Marra+Yeh Architects Melizza Morales, Government Architect NSW Michael Mossman, USYD Dagmar Reinhardt, USYD Ken Yeh, Marra+Yeh Architects

Thesis Studio Duanfang Lu Matt Chan, Scale Architecture Qianyi Lim, USYD/Sibling Architecture Sephira Yawen Luo, Architect Olivia Hyde, USYD/NSW Government Architects Neil Mackenzie, IBI Group Daniele Gianotti, USYD Yiwen Yuan, USYD Weijie Hu, USYD Niranjika Chandima Kumari Wijesooriya, USYD Aakash Khurana, USYD Vaughn Lane, Architect Vaughn Lane Gonzalo Valiente Oriol Laura Touman, UTS Miguel Rodriguez Casellas, UTS Rodrigo Andres Valenzuela, Rodrigo Valenzuela Jerez Arquitectos Asociados Jose Llano Loyola, Aulaboratorio Jorge Valiente Oriol Amaia Sánchez-Velasco, UTS Miguel Rodríguez-Casellas, UTS Sebastian Tsang Jun Win Choi, TAHPI Edward Li, Dreamscapes Architects Felix Saw, Architecture BVN Andrew Fong, Hayball

Odyssey

Chris L Smith (Harbour Bath) Ross Anderson, USYD Min Dark, Andrew Burges Architects Melinda Gaughwin, USYD Kate Goodwin, USYD Laurence Kimmel, UNSW Tye McBride, Allen Jack+Cottier

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BACHELOR OF DESIGN IN ARCHITECTURE

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Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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Michael Muir Program Director, Bachelor of Design in Architecture

Odyssey

When Bob Dylan accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, the ‘rambling glory’ of his acceptance speech swirled around three books, Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.

In Bob’s words, ‘The Odyssey is a strange, adventurous tale of a grown man trying to get home after fighting in a war. He’s on that long journey home, and it’s filled with traps and pitfalls ... he’s tossed and turned by the winds. Restless winds, chilly winds, unfriendly winds. He travels far, and then he gets blown back.’ And later, ‘That’s what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living.’

Architecture too, like Bob’s songs, is a living thing. It is meant to be lived. Our Odyssey through three years in the Wilkinson Building (when we could) is the blink of an eye.

Our degree is Design in Architecture. And design too is a risky business. Demanding much and giving back more. Sometimes. What is there about these three years that is so special? First, it’s our people. Our students and our teachers. All of us together. Second is our course. Founded on the fundamental principles of the design studio – students working closely with their peers and teachers ... in a collaborative and mutually supportive environment. Always emphasising the importance of learning by doing and learning by making. Through drawings, through models, through prototypes and more. We have the facilities to back up this mode of teaching and learning, studios, computer labs, extensive workshops and all the rest.

Our course is supported on the main pillars of architectural education and practice – technology, art practice, history and theory and communications. And finally, our greatest strength is our commitment to ensuring all our students achieve a level of cultural competence and understanding to set them up to work anywhere from large commercial architectural offices to community based design and all points between. Anywhere.

‘To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven.’ And the time now is graduation. Our students have come from those first simple designs (how many years ago was it?), to this, the graduation exhibition at the end of third year. Another year over and a new one soon begun.

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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David Moore, Sydney Harbour From 16,000 Feet (1966); Aldo Rossi, Teatro del Mondo (1981) [Composite Image by Ross Anderson]

Sydney Harbour Drama House

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Ross Anderson

Architecture Studio 3B

Odyssey

Taking its cues from the Italian architect Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mundo – a temporary floating theatre designed and built for the ‘theatre and architecture’ section of the 1980 Venice Biennale, the Sydney Harbour Drama House exchanges ancient, urbane waterways for the antipodean harbour’s shoreline of coves and points, bays and headlands. The sweep of watery expanse that this project adopts as its territory, sometimes calm and glistening, others wild with the full force of nature, replaces the typical demarcated architectural site.

The theatre may variously withstand or harness some of Sydney Harbour’s environmental phenomena and incorporate them into the dramatic experience of the building. For both the performers and audience the theatre might be an island of insulated calm, or it might revel in its unsettling exposure to the come-what-may of its maritime conditions. And as much as the floating theatre is a transformative experience for performer and audience, so too might it transform its shore bound context, whether visible and public, or tucked away in a barely discoverable nook.

Just as the location is up for grabs, so is the character of the theatre; it might be dedicated to one genre of performance or even one playwright, or it might attempt to provide a stage for a kind of theatre yet to come. As Rossi himself said of his remarkable Teatro del Mundo, it was ‘situated between the house of infancy and the house of death as a place that is purely for performances, and memory and foreboding belong to it.’

Tutors Sean Akahane-Bryen Justine Anderson Paolo Apostolides Maria Cano Dominguez Isabel Gabaldon Victoria King Neena Mand Alia Nehme Mano Ponnambalam Russell Rodrigo Thomas Stromberg Christian Williams Peter Nguyen

Sean Akahane-Bryen

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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(L) Zhangyan Ye, ‘Archipelago Theatre’. If I asked you: do islands really exist in this world, what would be your answer? You have your claim, and I have my story. I guess, in fact, there are no islands in this world, and they are all just mountains hidden by the sea. They are far away from each other, and they are close to each other. Like the sun, moon and stars, they like to sing softly, especially at night when no one is around. A long, long time ago, we were like them, then came a flood, and we too became islands.

(R) Chuyue Jiang, ‘Monolith on the Sea’. ‘We have no contemporary theatre. No agitators’ theatre, no tribunal, no force which does not merely comment on life, but shapes it.’ – Frederick Kiesler, Endless Theatre (Shelter Magazine, 1932) As a place of action, theatre not only refers to dramatic practice but also to architecture that performs. It can create spatial performativity within various social events, historic narratives, aesthetic preferences and daily routines. Theatre tells stories all the time and so does the architecture. Time as another dimension is added to this theatre that carries out more events reflecting its big context.

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Odyssey

Justine Anderson

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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(L) Ivy Guo, ‘Watcher’. This project is designed in response to the conflict between human and nature, its beauty and also its chaos. The focal point is a coral reef, an essential part of a harbour ecosystem. As water temperatures rise, more shallow water space in Sydney Harbour can be warm enough for coral growing conditions. Based on this idea, the site is chosen on the Fishing Point, a tranquil clear shallow water space with mirror-like water surface extending into sea, surrounded by hills of woods.

(R) Cheryl Ding, ‘Echo’. Sydney has plenty of harbour baths built along

the coast, most of which are free for the public to relax in and enjoy. ‘Echo’ is located near Bradleys Head, 80 metres away from the coastline. It aims to create a close interaction among performance, audience and water, and rather than just serve as a theatre, it is also a floating sculpture, a place for leisure, echoing the characteristic of freedom and romance of the site. Inspired by Teatro Oficina, the project makes a combination of street and theatre, enabling the audience to have a close interaction with performances.

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Odyssey

Paolo Apostolides

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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(L) Hang Xu, ‘Shield of Perseus’. Whether it is a mirrored façade at the entrance reflecting the surrounding or the shadow plays in the theatre, reflection and shadow are used to indirectly perceive the environment, thus breaking down the barriers between reality and illusion. The proposal of this project challenges the threshold between illusion and reality, embracing possibilities of an apocalyptic future in the wake of the climate crisis within the context of Sydney Harbour. (R) Thomas Li, ‘The Theatre Charoneum’. The tale of Orpheus and Eurydices first told by Virgil is

retold within the depths of the ‘Theatre Charoneum’. Sitting within the embrace of Nawi-Cove like a hibernating beast, its body is pierced by prosthetic elements setting a scene of drama and violence. The tectonics are derived from the apotheotic journey of the Greek temple. Instead of ascending, each level steps down, reflecting a journey to the underworld, allowing an audience to experience the play’s narrative. Stages are arranged as an inverted courtyard theatre where the actors surround the audience. Each stage opens outside, merging with the environment.

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Odyssey

Maria Cano Dominguez

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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(L) Joy Hung, ‘Beatrix, Theatre Flees’. ‘Beatrix’ is a mobile floating theatre that encourages people to flee the border of urban land to the dynamic body of water that is Sydney Harbour, and to face the uncertainty, excitation, and fear of water. She transforms the conventional building form into floating pieces that passively move with the ebb and flow of water. As tides rise and fall, ‘Beatrix’ changes the urban logic around her.

(R) Shuyu Wang, ‘The Lighthouse Theatre’. To break the stereotype of traditional theatre, ‘The Lighthouse Theatre’ is used as the medium and

the ocean as the carrier to support the main body of performers – sea creatures and humans. A new kind of ‘performance’ is carried in the form of drama to break the traditional definition of ‘performance’. The time and field of the ‘performance’ has great uncertainty, which can make the audience realise the uncontrollability of nature. The project aims to create a place that can eliminate the sense of distance between the audience and the stage, break the boundary between the audience and the performer, thereby increase their interaction.

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Odyssey

Isabel Gabaldon

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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(L) Yidi Chen, ‘Theatre of Duality’. The heterotopic spaces in architecture convey an idea of juxtaposition, combining incompatible elements in a single entity. Inspired by Foucault’s interpretation of ‘theatre’ spaces as a heterotopia, the boundary of time-space is blurred by the contrasting articulation of the two most symbolic materials in Sydney’s architectural history, sandstone and steel, creating duality in materiality, ambiance and spirit. As a spatial montage, the theatre bridges the indigenous history, industrial past, and contemporary urban scenarios, displaying the coexistence of different histories of Barangaroo.

(R) Sue Cho, ‘Gully Theatre’. ‘The Gully Theatre’ reflects, and extends the experience and form of its site, Rosa Gully. The project extends the journey through the gully by incorporating sensory and visual aids. This is to connect both architecture and site with the experience of the theatre, which begins not at the structure, but at the start of the site. The design of the Gully Theatre will play on the key distinguishing features of the cliff, not as a direct copy but as a nod and inspiration to turn the natural forms into architectural cues.

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Odyssey

Victoria King

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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(L) Monica Chen, ‘The Theatre of Lunatic’. The essence of theatre art is conflict – how human beings face and deal with it. Traumatised people have a fear of conflict, as it may lead to a loss of self-control. Based on Antonin Artaud’s theory, this theatre proposes a catharsis by evoking the most unpleasant feelings in its audience, and ultimately, a therapy helps them to regain their vitality. (R) Jasmine O’Loughlin-Glover, ‘Theatre of Movement’. Sydney’s harbour is simultaneously the city’s greatest natural asset and cynical symbol of private interest. Against this backdrop, the

theatre is positioned to support public accessibility to landscape, where the movement of bodies in space becomes a political act. Situated across two sites, movement drives architectural expression. Part dance-based theatre, part bathing pavilion, a floating stage traces a trajectory that reclaims sight lines previously obscured by private landholdings. Time is expressed in structure and materiality: tensile canopies frame the ephemeral flux of light, air, water; while sandstone submerged in saltwater sets the stage for a slow dance of erosion.

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Odyssey

Neena Mand

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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(L) Estella Li, ‘Endless Theatre 2.0’. Theatre is an extension of our imagination, standing on the boundary of reality and fantasy. The realms of the two mingle at a theatre, the space within is a world of augmented surrealism. The objection of ‘Endless Theatre 2.0’ is to tolerate fantasies that are catalysed from our imaginations. A surrealist approach has been taken at the shore of Milsons Point, adjacent to Luna Park. The site is chosen for the dreamlike atmosphere of the theme park, and the theatre in turn contributes to the theme park as a ‘ride’. (R) Brian Yung, ‘Sunken Fragments’. I have been interested in the concept of cultural fragments

and the re-assemblage/recollection of the city’s memory. The interaction among architecture, performance arts and cityscape/water would bring visitors the surreal and foreign experience, segregated from the reality using the real-life features. Personally, I’d like to create a distorted reality that the structure itself creates drama. Contrast/transcendence between bustle and seclusion, submergence and reflection. In this project, I have tested with different forms and structures, i.e. lean, tie, wrap, etc. to achieve the unreal vision.

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Odyssey

Alia Nehme

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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(L) Roger Fu, ‘Isle Atlantica’. This project aims to create a mystical island theatre which brings the audience into a world that is opposite to the prevailing rhetoric of economics and efficiency. The main design approach is to amplify the exclusiveness of the chosen site, Fort Denison.

It’s then turned into the creation of the ring walk layout and the incorporation of dynamic ocean tides. Poetically, the theatre only reveals itself and performs during high tide, at night, and brings the audience into a magical and mystical world.

(R) Yanchin Liu, ‘Angel Theatre’. The history of The Gap is shadowed with shipwrecks and suicide, yet it also represents the wonder of nature as the tenacity of rock faces endures the ruins of time and erosion. ‘Angel Theatre’ provides solace amidst the dark history of the site, immortalising the legacy of the ‘Angel of the Gap’, Don Richie. The three theatres within ‘Angel Theatre’ represent a journey through past, present and future, as visitors are guided along a trajectory from dark to light in a cyclical circulation symbolic of rebirth and renewal.

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Odyssey

Mano Ponnambalam

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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(L) Christopher Tjhia, ‘Tidal Theatre’. The idea of place is a cornerstone for any architectural project. ‘The Tidal Theatre’ endeavours to weave the essence of its place with the drama of a theatre. The location of Rose Bay was chosen for its flat, sandy foreshore, and is strongly affected by the changing of the tides. The theatre, which has a capacity of 250 people, harmonises with its surroundings through the use of sympathetic materials and the use of the changing tides to perform dynamic roof transformations throughout the day. (R) Peter Jorgensen, ‘Canopy’. ‘Canopy’ is a theatre of movement. Inspired by First Nations mnemonic systems,

audience and performer move together through a contoured landscape, suspended on a forest of timber columns. Seasonally flowering native trees renew audience experience throughout the year while creating a mnemonic dialogue between the theatre and its context. A Vitruvian geometry guides the spatial layout even as it is actively subverted, blurring the distinction between planned and organic growth. Through geometry, landscape and narrative, ‘Canopy’ explores the idea of a ‘third space’ in Australian architecture, emerging from the interaction between First Nations and western perspectives.

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Odyssey

Russell Rodrigo

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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(L) Hannah Carlon, ‘Songlines’. This design celebrates the rich cultural and historical narrative of the Eora nation and acknowledges the diverse junction of people, place and histories. Located in Barangaroo’s Nawi Cove, the theatre itself is designed as a performance space for the Bangarra Dance Company to narrate the story of respected Eora woman, Barangaroo. This design emerges from a collaborative design process with Wiradjuri artist Johnathan Jones which focused on recalling Indigenous Songlines through the meandering and sweeping nature of the architecture itself. (R) Christine Liu, ‘Project Upcycle’. How can

theatre be a catalyst and sensor for rethinking a sustainable connection with community and water? ‘Project Upcycle’ explores experimental and immersive theatre in parallel with pollution in the Sydney Harbour.

The theatre becomes a site for ocean waste collection, with collected waste becoming the raw material used for creating props for theatre performances. By creating a theatre that functions in both workshop and performance mode, the boundary between the audience, environmentalists, and theatre performers becomes blurred – everyone becomes an ‘actor’ against a common cause within the theatre.

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Odyssey

Thomas Stromberg

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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(L) Lillian Liao, ‘Theatre of Invisible City’. ‘Theatre of Invisible City’ is designed for underwater performance. Inspired by Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, four locations were selected as anchoring points while the theatre would flow to the deepest areas to have the show. Inspired by jellyfish and waterbomb origami, the transforming form allows visitors to sit around the stage and enjoy the underwater show. Meanwhile, the back of the stage would light up for the onshore people, unveiling the stories that are behind the scenes. (R) Greta He, ‘Behind the Masks’. Theatre, ultimately, is a projection of life stories, with the capability to articulate

intangible qualities in life. Therefore, Thalia and Melpomene, draw the connection between theatre and reality, as both are never-ending oscillations between comedy and tragedy. The project establishes a conceptual framework consisting of ‘projected reality’ and ‘superimposed absurdity’.

The proposal abstracts typologies from Sydney landmarks and iterates them with inspirations from stories related to Existentialism. The multiple narratives overlay logics of Existentialism, which articulates the nothingness behind the endlessly layered masks of Thalia and Melpomene.

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Odyssey

Christian Williams

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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(L) Olivia D’Souza, ‘The Everyday Duet’. A theatre hidden; a stage revealed. A space that explores the interchangeable relationship between audience and performer, a theatre of mimesis. A duet that blurs the boundaries between theatre and the everyday, performer and audience.

Located off Ballast Point, the form draws on remnants of oil storage infrastructure that remains on site. The design creates a conversation between the light, semitransparent, perforated corten forms above and the solidity of the structure partially hidden, preserved beneath.

(R) Chris Hamblin, ‘The Spectral Theatre’. ‘The Spectral Theatre’ at the Coal Loader is an adaptable, semi-outdoor space, with an emphasis on innovative staging in contemporary performance. The venue draws attention to the site’s past and embedded history from both pre and post 1788, while also providing a space for renewed, restored, and reclaimed ideas. The theatre takes its name from a hypothesis that within the layers of our history lie the ghosts of our past; specters overlayed and replayed through our stories.

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Odyssey

Peter Nguyen

Bachelor of Design in Architecture

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(L) Domenic Stefanutti, ‘Beehive’. In the 1920s, Carradah Park was leased to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (predecessor of BP) to build oil silos. These silos are long gone, but the deep scars and cavities of an industrial past in the Sydney topography remain. This project seeks to celebrate the natural beauty of the park, creating a ‘naturalism theatre/ performance’ that re-appropriates nature into the design, remediating and creating awareness of its former industrial use.

(R) Lucy Guo, ‘The Water Lantern’. The architecture primarily sits within Pirrama Park in Pyrmont but it also has the ability to detach and float off elsewhere. Like a ‘Water Lantern’, the architecture brings in a sense of lightness while floating on the water across Sydney Harbour and provides an exciting adventure within the translucent facade. When the theatre floats off, the area transforms into a public bath. The architecture hopes to become a meeting place with the urban design features added onto the landscape of Pirrama Park.

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Odyssey

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Student List Architecture Studio 3B Coordinator Ross Anderson

Master of Architecture

Sean Akahane-Bryen Mincong Chen Qipei Fang Weijian Guo Keli Corey Hu Doudou Hu Katrina Carmen Jelavic Chuyue Jiang Qiyin Sheng Mantej Singh Yu Tang Yimon Thaw Madison Amy Trench Alan Vichidvongsa Zhangyan Ye Zihe Zhou Justine Anderson Kate Gabrielle Castillo Meixi Chen Keyu Deng Junhan Ding Isabella Marie Gillett Yantong Guo Jingyun He Chuan Liu Zheng Liu Yucheng Sun Ting Wai Wallis Tam Ang Tu Minhui Wang Junru Yan

Paolo Apostolides Harrison Barden Yingying Chen Minne Chen Ethan Chew Lu Kong Thomas Zelin Li Amanda Ming Huei Loh Bernadette Macaraniag Nataya Noni Mills Aaron Anthony O’Mahony Saanya Parmar Bridget Elizabeth Scott Antigoni Sioulas Hoi Fung Wong Hugh Oscar Woods Hang Xu

Isabel Gabaldon Kleopatra Malathy Ananda Manaini Ravela Bulu Chin Yu Chan Yidi Yidi Chen Suyeon Cho Trieu Duong Phillip Tengfei Jian Annie Jea Woo Kang Jonathan Kelleher Monika Hunjoo Kiss Yihan Mei Maximilian Routh Aurora Ward Ruby Williamson Amanda Yao Honghao Ye

Neena Mand Theresia Helen Alamsyah George Anicic Peitianrun Cai Xinyu Chen Vito Erson Lorrain Gong Michelle Huang Yiqia Li Erin Kay Pritchett Nanako Reza Vivian Su Zubin Kawmos Varghese Bangkai Yu Man Hang Brian Yung Ting Zhao Tianyu Zheng

Maria Cano Dominguez Nimit Batavia Ying Fei Nicholas Anthony Hilton Hsin-Min Hung Xiaohan Li Yutong Judy Liang Sahana Mohanarajah Arundhati Roy Xuan Sun Calvin Han Yik Tan Shuyu Wang Stanley Joseph Whippy Jiaying Xu Mingxin Yang Chengtian Ye

Victoria King Matthew William Britt Yanyu Chen Daipeng Chen Blake Corry Jasmine O’Loughlin-Glover Young Bin Gong Ying Huang Aaishvika Rakesh Jayswal Jacky Jiang Qing Li Suyang Suyang Meng Yuxin Tang Siyi Wang Stella Catherine Wilde Alicia Li-Min Wong Yuzhen Xin Huixin Zhu

Alia Nehme Michael Cho Rei Dole Eng Antony Fenhas Roger Jie Fu Jason Gunawan Alice Zi Qi He Andres Ernesto Hidalgo Coelho De Souza Rebecca Huynh Xinlin Lin Natalie Lin Yanchin Liu Berinder Singh Khadijah Tahir Patrick John Tynan Sabrina Utharntharm George Zhuang

Mano Ponnambalam Bianca Alberto David Aron Barko Wentao Dai Adria Georgina Baluyut De Borja Daisy King Junyao Li Alexandra Miletich Angus James Stewart Mills Mehwish Miran Khan Thomas Papetti Weiyi Ran Peter Jorgensen Christopher Tjhia Angela Xu Wenxi Zeng Haoran Ventura Zhang Yuyang Zhang Russell Rodrigo Isabella Claire Camilleri Hannah Brady Carlon Pok Hang Boris Chan Mina Nabil Shehata Ata-Al la Hanna Christopher Hasham Rushuang He Shreya Sanjaykumar Joshi Christine Jing Liu Sophie Maclennan Pike Chim Wa Ng Jasmine Sharp Yi Yang Dylan Yap Vanessa Kah Yan Yong Julia Yoo Millie Stevens Youngman

External Contributors and Guest Critics

Thomas Stromberg Claude Gray Jiaqi He Yangtian Kang Yaqi Liao Qianyu Liu Shandy Liu Kevin Luu Yankuo Ma Samuel Charles Preston Wing Yan Tam Chun Ho Tsui Kaidi Wu Ruyi Zhao Shihan Zhao Hans-Bjorn Antaeus Edmund Zywko-Hicks

Sean Akahane-Bryen Jennifer McMaster, TRIAS Tiffany Liew, Andrew Burns Architecture

Russell Rodrigo Vesna Trobec, Studio Trobec Chris Smith, USYD

Justine Anderson Jason Dibbs, USYD Peter Fisher, UON

Thomas Stromberg Georgia Forbes-Smith, Scale Architecture Justin Cawley, UON

Luke Hannaford, CHROFI Lachlan Howe, Ian Bennett Design Studio Paolo Apostolides Behnaz Avazpour, UNSW Amir Taheri, USYD Mark Szekely, M.A.Szekely Phoebe Grainer, Griffin Theatre Company Maria Cano Dominguez Amaia Sánchez Velasco, UTS Miguel Sanchez Velasco, UTS Harsha Rajashekar, Billard Leece Partnership Demet Dincer, UNSW Isabel Gabaldon Paul Van der Westhuizen, Orosi: Design, Construction Weijie Hu, USYD Carolina Rodriguez, Studiodias Victoria King Sarah Mair, Parlour Qun Zhang, Craig Tan Architects Davin Nurimba, Virginia Kerridge Architects Angie Li, Weston Williamson and Partners Neena Mand Matthew Roberts, Cox Architects Xavier Mand, Grimshaw Architects Alia Nehme Peter Farman, 4site architecture Victor Alcami, Alcami Architecture Joshua Sleight, Studio Trobec Mano Ponnambalam Charles Peters, Craft Architecture Caroline Comino, Government Architects Office

Christian Williams Campbell Drake, UTS Chris Bamborough, UTS Sophie Lanigan, USYD Pearse McDonough, UTS Peter Nguyen Felipe Miranda, Cox Architecture

Odyssey

Christian Williams Annisa Amini Devanshi Arora Sally Cai Ryan Chan Olivia D'Souza Louis Esterman Lita Gong Christopher Hamblin Hazel Ji Anthea Kwan Lauren Li Tony Ters Wenhui Zhou Kevin Zhong Ziqi Zhu

Peter Nguyen Gwyneth Elauria Isabelle Manion Fleming Xinlei Guo Aimee Louise Jeffries Wing Him Christopher Lee Adrian Chun Yin Leung Adi Li Yinzhou Lin Sihwan Oh Henry Bruce Tycho Owens Callum John Parker Jingwen Qiao Domenic Stefanutti Oskar Alexander Straatveit Makenzie Elizabeth Wilson

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BACHELOR OF ARCHITECTURE AND ENVIRONMENTS

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Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

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Odyssey

The Bachelor of Architecture and Environments (BAE) program provides its students with a uniquely broad overview of the built environment through studies in architecture, urban planning, sustainability, heritage, building systems, and construction and property.

Over the course of three years, students develop a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between architects, urban planners, urban designers, heritage conservationists, property developers, engineers, construction managers and other built environment professionals. Our unique program opens the door to a wide range of professions in the field and provides the skills and knowledge to operate successfully in today’s complex and globalised built environment.

Through intensive practical, laboratory and studio-based classes students learn the latest techniques employed by the school’s full range of disciplines including construction methods, structural principles and building material properties. The culmination of the BAE course of study is the capstone studio where students are presented with an opportunity to explore one of the several disciplines they encountered during the first two and a half years of their studies through the design of a sufficiently complex building, city structure, or town centre.

Matthew Mindrup Program Director, Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

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Design Integration Lab: Capstone Coordinator Matthew Mindrup

Mapping Language – Patyegarang to Dawes

Haptic Encounters in Memory and Forgetting

Haptic Encounters as Regional Interfaces

Architecture as Intervention Chris Fox

Haptic Environments I Matthew Mindrup

Haptic Environments II Ryan Dingle

The story of young Cammeraygal woman Patyegarang and a British Lieutenant William Dawes is framed against the backdrop of a nascent Sydney colony.

Patyegarang, described as ‘the first Aboriginal linguist’, would prove to be crucial in the survival of her Sydney-based native tongue - the Gadigal language. Timekeeper, meteorologist, surveyor and astronomer Dawes formed a unique connection with Patyegarang and recorded their conversations in meticulous detail.

Dawes’ interpretation of the spoken Gadigal language forms a type of linguistic mapping; a verbal morphology.

This studio develops an Oral History Library as an intervention into the heritage buildings of the Sydney Observatory, near where Patyegarang and Dawes had their extraordinary first contact. Building on this story of mapping language and working with First Nations design thinking and a connection to Country framework, this studio rethinks the use of the Observatory and the colonial architecture of its buildings to develop a deeper connection to story, material and place.

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 studio begins by forgetting the identities of the haptic encounters on Cockatoo Island as inspiration for designing memorable prompts in a Sydney Oral History Library.

It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito, spiraling upward, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city.

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Whilst storytelling is founded in the communicative ability of the individual, the way in which audiences comprehend the information is ultimately affected by the totality of delivery, inclusive of the haptic environment in which the story is told.

As the built environment mediates natural environments, designed constructions affect inhabitant’s connection to the regional qualities of place, with designed environments often being separate from the region in which constructions are located.

This studio embraces the regional haptic qualities of the site in order to develop design proposals which are specific to Sydney and the inhabitants whose stories are being documented and re-told.

The Map is Not the Territory Architectural History and Theory Thomas Stromberg Site mapping, as a process-oriented design methodology, employs a range of diagrammatic abstractions to undermine preconceived ideas and strategically expose layers of meaning and potential inherent in the topology, history and geography of the site. Each of these diagrammatic abstractions is examined as spatial and theoretical parameters codifying the context and program. Both orchestrated and serendipitous opportunities continuously present themselves, making the design process a self-perpetuating oscillation between discovery and intent.

The narrative process embeds the architectural product by extending and weaving themes developed in site mapping into the circulatory and spatial properties of the design.

Thus the architectural proposal grows out of the multi-layered idiosyncrasies of its site and context.

Collisions, fractures, intersections, voids and interstitial spaces are all properties (historical and theoretical, circulatory and spatial) that can extend from the context and through the conceptual and physical fabric to provide the core narrative of the proposal.

Sous les pavés, la plage!

Urban Architecture Mano Ponnambalam It is not down in any map; true places never are.

- Herman Melville

The making of a city is

Sustainability I Robert Barnstone Over time the way we conceive and construct our built environment is in a large part determined by our frame of reference.

In ancient Greece, this was developed by a tektōn (τέκτων)—carpenter, woodworker, or builder— who used local materials, climate, and even existing structures to invent tectonics (configurations of material and space) and make places at and in which activities occur.

By their very nature, these tectonics were, in contemporary terms, sustainable.

The site is within the immediate proximity of the drydock on Cockatoo Island, where ships were once made. The studio thus explores the role that local tectonics can play as a source of inspiration for creating new combinations of space, material and form that satisfy the poetic and quixotic aspects of recording and sharing oral histories. This studio seeks to revive the role of the tektōn in the framing and reframing of material and spatial tectonics for the poetic conceptualisation of an Oral History Library: a vessel of personal histories and of moments of significance captured in the voices of revered individuals.

Anti-Archive of Healthy Cities Post-Capitalist and Urban Mythologies Ecology

Building Sustainable Cities

Sustainability II Gonzalo Valiente Oriol

Strategic Urbanism Kristina Ulm

Strategic Urbanism II Parisa Zare

According to multiple contemporary thinkers, discourses on sustainability are loaded with well-intentioned excuses to justify

This urban design studio offers a vision of a small urban precinct, reimagined as a healthy and ecologically sensitive urban

Inclusive cities respond and adapt more easily to future challenges. In a world threatened by a changing climate and

the profitable continuity of global capitalism’s unsustainable economic and political model. Even the latest United Nations ICCC reports assert that technological solutionism cannot resolve the wicked challenge of preserving planetary life from further and broader mass-extinctions. It is an irresolvable (geo)political puzzle unless an international wave of civilian rebellions paralyses and entirely redefines today’s extraction-production-consumption drift.

A critical dialogue with historical visions of the city as a political project, this studio drafts radical imaginaries of a Sydney rebelling against its deeply colonial and capitalist roots. A study of the linkages between mythology (as non-factual oral history), architecture, power, symbolism, and monumentality, the studio imagines the architectural and institutional symbol of a ‘new’ Sydney. Conceptually, the studio faces a dual challenge: (1) imagining the socio-cultural scope of ‘revolutionary’ processes’, and (2) envisioning their spatial, symbolic and aesthetic impact on Sydney’s urban space.

precinct. Starting with an exploration of the context and history of the site at a strategic urbanism scale, the studio redesigns built and natural environments such as streets, built form, and the natural landscape. Employing systems thinking, which understand the city as a socio-ecological system and designs holistically for people. Projects chose a specific focus such as water management, food systems, indigenous urbanism and so on.

Considering the oral history library as a ‘shared terrain’ at the interface between natural and built environment, we investigate how urban spaces integrate oral histories of the past and how to design opportunities for storytelling and the sharing of cultural knowledge in our everyday environment.

a global pandemic, the process of inclusive design starts by understanding the concepts of complex urban systems and moves to design. Working across masterplans of public and shared space in the inner Sydney area, this studio works collaboratively to investigate past practices of urban design to reimagine and plan for an inclusive future urbansim.

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evolutionary, having a beginning but no end…

It continues to transform and in doing so influences the way we live and work. This city that we experience everyday has many hidden layers, whose richness is often left dormant and uncelebrated.

While Sydney’s many treasures are already on display in the form of views, monuments, significant landmarks, and buildings there are still some – similar to Berlin, Paris, Barcelona and Melbourne – that must be found and discovered.

It is these hidden, social and architectural riches, often known only by word of mouth that give a city its unique flavour and pleasurable mystery.

This studio explores the role of mystery and discovery in the proposal of a public cultural centre situated in the abandoned at St James Station below Hyde Park. Echoes of the 1968 Parisian slogan Sous les pavés, la plage! (‘Under the paving stones, the beach!’) usher in a revolution of what it means to make a city and define its character.

Shifting Frames

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Chris Fox

Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

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(L) Ruby Matthews, ‘Common Ground’. This project exhibits Sydney Observatory rethought as an oral history museum through the lens of finding common ground between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians under the stars. Two non-Indigenous constellations, Crux and Scorpius, lay at the head and tail respectively of the Indigenous star group – Dark Emu. Other senses are also employed throughout the site with native plants making up scent (lemon myrtle, mint bush), touch (grass tree, sandpaper fig) and taste (lilly-pilly, finger lime) gardens. White sandstone and copper roofing eventually show their age and story with time.

(R) Alessandro Pinzin, ‘Indigenous Oral History’. Inspired by historical Indigenous trails, Sydney’s harbour system and Indigenous Australian ideas of connecting to Country, the design is a continuous trail, integrated into a new wetland ecosystem with open air and light structures at widenings, intersections and dead ends. At these areas people learn and engage in Indigenous cultural practices whilst being immersed by the native ecosystem. Notions of interior and exterior have been blurred to create a seamless and connected feeling between places of gathering and the environment.

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Matthew Mindrup

Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

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(L) Ye Zhang, ‘Under the Tides’. This project is the Sydney Oral History Library on Cockatoo Island. History is like an iceberg, the part exposed to the sun melts, while the underwater part is hidden. Oral history preserves and stores the history that is easily lost, so that it can be heard and seen by future generations. The project will design the different acoustics, lighting and air elements of the building through haptic environments, giving visitors a more profound sensory experience. Part of the library is hidden underwater at high tide and exposed at low tide, while the other part is suspended above the water.

(R) Russell Li, ‘The Segue’. The design concepts are inspired by the city Despina from Italo Calvino’s book, Invisible Cities. The aim of the project is to create a bridge between the land and water as a metaphor of oral history being the bridge between past and present. The building consists of a timber frame structure and a series of opening precast concrete boxes sitting within the ‘frame’ space. The boxes transit from front to the rear, above to below as visitors get closer to the water, engaging the visitors with a series of rotated vessels with a haptic emphasis of light.

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Ryan Dingle

Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

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(L) Katie Fanos, ‘Kaleidoscope’. The design of the building emulates the function of a kaleidoscope, which is to deprive the human senses in order to enhance the beauty of the image presented. Similarly, the building uses sensory deprivation to enhance the haptic experiences of its spaces.

Hence, the aim of the architecture of the building is to create a way to see, where the experiences and qualities of the site inform the form of the building and, in turn, create an immersive experience that emotionally transforms the individual. (R) Zhang Shiqi Zhang, ‘VOIS-S’. ‘VOIS-S’

Oral History Library is located at an alleyway on Cockatoo Island, Sydney, NSW. ‘VOIS-S’ stands for the Voice of Steel and Sandstone, representing the major materials used in this building. The design reinforces different haptic spaces at different points in the library. The interaction of heavy and light materials combined with the linear shape of the building aims to provide users with an experience of shuffling between old and new while moving in the space. The overall design aims to deliver a journey of learning, listening and feeling the rich history of Cockatoo Island.

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Trhomas Stromberg

Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

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(L) Madeleine Kennedy, ‘The Waterhole’. ‘The Waterhole’ is a place of meeting where people come to hear and tell their stories. A well of living water rolls down the centre of the bunker-like concrete mass that delves into its sandstone surroundings. Descending into the dark, the irregular, circular motion drives one in and out, up and down, creating a variety of experience and interpretation. Seeking a breath of fresh air, one may rise from within the layers below, to escape. Stories are unveiled, yet rescind once again into the abyss.

(R) Katherine Jones, ‘The Citizens Cave’. This museum doesn’t pretend to blend in. Drawing from the feeling of the existing site and Knossos Temple, the narrative of a labyrinthine building began. ‘Their wild glare and half crazed appearance as the light of the open door fell upon them, struck us with horror.’ This inspired the idea of a building opening up.

The interior is constantly shifting as the tilted walls connect with the light above, echoing the idea of Plato’s cave and how shadows tell stories.

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Mano Ponnambalam

Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

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(L) Harry Wiraputra, ‘Mirrored Movements’. Situated in the abandoned tunnels of St. James Station, ‘Mirrored Movements’ tackles the complexity of the subterranean site by translating the natural circulation above ground into a sequence of spaces underground. This project references the Grande Louvre designed by the late I.M. Pei by having a conical circulation ramp that is mirrored from the descending steps of the Sandringham Garden. This ramp becomes the circulation spine of the proposed Oral History Library by giving its visitors the option to enter the permanent exhibition space halfway or directly enter the storage space through the tunnels. (R) Delos He, ‘Monument Valley’. The design

reawakens the sleeping tunnels underneath Hyde Park with radical and theatricalised architectural interventions, with the concept dealing with the notion of permanence, by an unconformist scatter of non-enduring relics beneath the ever-changing city. Blurred-boundary program spaces defined by industrious structures, raw finishes, intersecting planes and alternating threshold moments were inserted to enact story-telling journeys between observers and performers, listeners and presenters, artifacts and minds, monadic and plural, lights and shadows. These interactive gestures opened up the tunnel beyond its innate exclusivity and reconciled its position with the public realm.

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Robert Barnstone

Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

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(L) Yan Luo, ‘The Folding Library’. The library provides a facility where the oral histories of its residents can be documented, studied, and passed onto future generations. It contains recording studios, a library of transcripts and recordings, an auditorium, storytelling spaces, temporary and permanent exhibition spaces. The design of the building is inspired by the ship’s movement and the water flow. Moreover, the shape of the building comes from the exploration of the folding paper, providing an enjoyable journey for visitors to excite their interest in history. The building is designed in a sustainable way, using CLT for the primary construction

material, applying photovoltaic panels on the roof, utilising natural daylight but blocking the harsh sun when needed, and engaging landscape with the building. (R) Sebastian Cullum, ‘Fitzroy Dock’. This project is an oral history library which will preserve and host the passing of knowledge through verbal communication. Throughout the building, sustainable strategies are rooted within the design, material pallette and technologies. This combination of active and passive systems is imperative to the functionality of the building and its ability to survive into the future.

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Gonzalo Valiente Oriol

Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

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(L) Kenza Sundal, ‘Architectural Ruins’. The technical solutions aimed at attaining sustainability are fallacies. A post-capitalist future is unavoidable and impending, and planning for it is a (geo)political challenge.

The concept of this project is to exhibit the ecology crisis brought on by anthropocentrism leading to unlimited violence against the nonhuman world. Its overall form is an antithesis, a representation of a rapidly rising metropolis by balancing the surrounding high-rises. The placement of the building will result from the break of the monuments signifying a new type of cultural and humanistic regeneration. A spatial relationship in which

individuals meet at various levels of intimacy. (R) Mungo McGregor, ‘Columbaria’. A continuous procession, a non-linear journey which prompts performativity and ritual in order to enable the nurture, archiving and exhibition of any kind of imaginary, mythology or history – especially those which are non-traditional or spoken. It is part architecture, part urban design, part landscape intervention, part social infrastructure, intended to reinforce the many narratives which make up Australia’s true national identity and in doing so, redefine it.

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Kristina Ulm

Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

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(L) Nhat Minh Nguyen, ‘Green Wattle’. This project seeks to revitalise and reconnect the shoreline promenade of Blackwattle Bay and the city by recreating an accessible waterfront, enhancing ecological sustainability and celebrating the local history. This is achieved through prioritising active transport, improving public access, providing visitor-focused and community zones to promote inclusivity and providing educational/recreational activities. (R) Tara Fischer, ‘Wellness Project’. The promise of jobs and prosperity, among other factors, pulls people to cities. Humans have been increasingly living in cities, with half of the global population already

lives in cities, and 75% of the population living in one of the 20 major cities in Australia. However, the promise of balance and wellness has become more and more unattainable as modern urban life becomes more complex, fast pasted, crowded, polluted, and stressful than ever before.

‘The Wellness Project’, is a masterplan and prototype project that aims to improve the wellness of individuals and the urban environment through effective urban design. It combines the 7 dimensions of wellness into 3 key objectives, Active Transport, Urban Ecology and Health and Wellbeing to create an precinct that improves quality of life.

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Parisa Zare

Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

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(L) Lulu Xu, ‘Urban Oasis’. The overall design takes ecology as the basic principle and devises five specific areas, the new fish markets, historical hall, the children's playground, wetland island and the sea bay. The project includes a traditional yarning circle which is located on a piece of land that projects into Blackwattle Bay and reflects the historical foreshore line.

This projection over the water reflects the historical foreshore line and can be used as a gathering place for people to come together to share stories and to speak and listen from the heart.

(R) Nick Groves, ‘Milsons Point Placemaking’. The vision of this project is to revitalise the precinct into an inclusive and better connected public domain through acknowledging local histories – by designing for people, improving active transport networks and promoting biophilia through water sensitive urban design. The redevelopment consists of six key interventions: a waterfront esplanade, amphitheatre, urban forest and sculpture garden, cycling network, swale and an open air museum.

Each intervention is underpinned by the above themes, and responds to honouring and respecting oral histories in our city.

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Student List

Design Integration Lab: Capstone

Design Integration Lab: Capstone Coordinator Matthew Mindrup

Robert Barnstone Charlie Alexander Marit Bruhn Steven Cullen Sebastian Cullum Kiana Eshraghi

Chris Fox Chuck Chen Ruiying Chen Wilson Dulieu Adam Feng Nickoletta Flannery

Gonzalo Valiente Oriol Shamsa Almansoori Jin Chu Lachlan Clegg Nadia Ebadi Rad Ahmad Farhat

Thomas Stromberg Yiwei Du Kaitlin Hargans Junior Hemakiatikul Oscar Jardine Katherine Jones

Parisa Zare Claudia Cheng Nick Groves Thea Gu Yuxiao Hong Tim Lisson

Caitlin Furby Ben Hyslop Daniel Iskandar Amber Wenchin Kang Yan Luo Jordan Makridopolus James McCauley Lamiyea Rahman Douglas Irimu Thinwa Jake Turner Zayn Zhao

Jingyi He Chris Huang Amanda Kim Mitchell Loveridge Charlie Luo Ruby Matthews Liam Novak Alessandro Pinzin Bo Wei Wu Guoqing Wu Sojin Yoon

Julia Farina Voegels Aaron Lee Scott Macandrews Mungo McGregor Mikayla Monfries Kevin Nanayakkara Rithik Pranav Saravanan Ming Su Kenza Sundal Pak Hin Sze Dominic Xu

Madeleine Kennedy Ser Wei Gabriel Koh Kritika Kritika Shefali Jiayan Li Xinyu Li Sijia Liang Runyuan Liu Qiuwen Lyu William Moon Denise Tu Harmony Wu

Louis Pan Shanaya Perera Kim Ramjan Idhika Sahi Madeline Sloane Shruthi Sriram Tianxing Wang Xiaoran Wu Belle Xu Aiden Zachariah Wenshan Zhu

Matthew Mindrup Ruixin Cai Anna He Charlotte Huang Daphne Lee Shiu Hei Lee Russell Li Zhi Ling Jinghuanyan Liu Zhongyi Liu Meggie Rebecca Setiawan Amanda Teo Ellie Tilse Weizhuo Wang Yihan Xu Jiayue Alice Yang Ye Zhang

Mano Ponnambalam Julian Bingham Arabella Cleary Delos He Ye He Ansley Huang Andrew Huhao Sam Hung Lily Li Leo Liu Harry Putra Diyaa Rajbhandari James Sawires Toni Trittis Bohao Zhao Katie Zheng Jason Zhou

Kristina Ulm Tara Fischer Lily Gibson Jingwen Han Jiayi Jia Cheok Ieng Lam Hoyas Li Lin Li Jonathan Ng

Ryan Dingle Windy Borriphonkij Alice Brittain Anastasia Chen Xinyu Chen Sandra Fang Katie Fanos Roberta Guido Da Silva Jason Hui Hui Arim Hwang Kexin Jiang Nadine Noelle Clarissa Novilian Raharja Rex Wang Shirley Wu Shirley Zhang Yilia Zhao

Nhat Minh Nguyen Stephanie Onisforou Zihan Qin Sophie Stone Tiffany Sun Iona Thompson Saskia Vernon Travis Wood Zhehui Yu

External Contributors and Guest Critics

Robert Barnstone Lawrance Wallen, UTS Ross Levy, Levy Art + Architecture Juan Pablo Pinto, Cave Urban Tom Rivard, REALMstudios

Thomas Stromberg Ross Anderson, USYD Justine Anderson, USYD

Ryan Dingle Nicholas Roberts, Efficient Living ESD Consultants Romina Rodriguez, Romina Rodriguez Designs Owen Olthof, Woods Bagot Catherine Bauer, Bates Smart

Adrienne Keane, USYD Joe Rowling, e8urban Alexa McAuley, Civille Matthew Kelly, UNSW Peter Murray, Transport for NSW Joel Dalberger, McGregor Coxall Eva Lloyd, UNSW Christiane Whiteley, Architectus Farnaz Fattahi, UNSW

Chris Fox Michael Muir, USYD

Gonzalo Valiente Oriol Laura Touman, Ciara Tapia Design Jorge Valiente Oriol, UTS Mano Ponnambalam Joe Agius, COX Architecture Olivia Hyde, USYD/NSW Government Architects Alia Nehme, USYD Paolo Apostolides, USYD

Kristina Ulm Deena Ridenour, USYD

Parisa Zare Behnaz Avazpour, UNSW Farnaz Fatahi, UNSW Vannessa Trowell, Western Williamson + Partners Michael Gheorghiu, UNSW Hossein Mohaddadirizeei, McGregor Coxall Steven Buck, McGregor Coxall

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Matthew Mindrup Alison Huynh, Bates Smart Vesna Trobec, Studio Trobec Yen Dao, Lendlease Gabriela Suhr, SJB Architects

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EXHIBITIONS, SYMPOSIUMS AND INTENSIVES

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Exhibitions, Symposiums and Intensives

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Tin Sheds Gallery

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Tin Sheds Gallery is a contemporary exhibition space located within the Sydney School that has been a site for radical experimentation for over 50 years. It provides a public platform for projects that inspire the imagination and ignite critical dialogue – addressing the diverse forces that shape the built environment locally and internationally.

The Tin Sheds officially opened in 1969 as an autonomous art space on City Road within the University grounds, facilitated by artists, academics and students. It spurred a pivotal historical movement in Australian art, nurturing cross-disciplinary experimentation and politically orientated practices for several decades. In 1989 it officially joined the School delivering art workshop classes and in 2004 relocated onsite to purpose-built gallery and became operationality integrated with the School.

The Gallery’s mission is to foster and advance debate about the role of architecture, art, design and urbanism in contemporary society through the production of innovative exhibitions, publications and related activities.

Gallery Manager Iakovos Amperidis Curatorial Lead Kate Goodwin

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Tin Sheds Gallery Advisory Committee Jennifer Ferng Kate Goodwin Luke Hespanhol Lian Loke Lee Stickells Michael Tawa

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Thresholds 21 January – 19 February 2021 Julia Davis and Lisa Jones in collaboration.

Curation by Claire Taylor.

Exhibitions, Symposiums and Intensives

‘Thresholds’ invites visitors to reimagine layers of the built environment under Sydney’s CBD and contemplate the passing of time in both human and geological time-scales.

The immersive installation draws the viewer into an enveloping darkness from which details of tunnels and chambers beneath the city are glimpsed in torchlight.

The imagery reveals ethereal, liminal spaces that exist just beyond the brightly-lit, bustling, familiar city. Experientially, the installation gives visitors an opportunity to slow down, reflect and be immersed in a unique subterranean landscape where there is a very different sense of time.

The installation and photographs reveal material histories of orphaned infrastructure sites. Once vital to the evolving city, successively repurposed and now abandoned, these sites appear in a state of suspended animation, as if waiting for the next phase of redevelopment. This is a layer of the city being actively reclaimed by the city’s remnant ecology, waterways and latent geology.

The large-scale drawings in the exhibition were created by submerging sheets of paper in the flooded chambers and then fixing the sediments that were deposited on them. They register the actions of the artists and capture the materiality of a particular time and place in the underground chambers: accretions of rock dust, city pollution, and traces of thousands of journeys in the particulate brake dust and dirt from the trains passing through adjacent live tunnels.

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HyperSext City 4 March – 9 April 2021 An exhibition by XYX Lab Extending Monash University XYX Lab’s ongoing local and international applied research, ‘HyperSext City’ draws attention to the experiences of women, girls and LGBTQI+ communities by representing data and intersectional narratives of gender that affect how places are accessed and occupied.

By drawing together the polemics of inclusion/exclusion in urban spaces, the exhibition invites the audience/participant to contribute their own solutions and suggestions for possible futures that might mitigate spatial inequality. The exhibition is a framework that is both a receptacle and a host for conversations about, and actions for, under-represented communities. The accumulative interventions and events provide multiple ways for audiences to contribute their lived experience and/or to develop understanding and empathy.

Making gender data visible, and generating new narratives based on evidence-based research and lived experience are important tools in developing gender-sensitive approaches to design, architecture and urbanism. This exhibition reveals existing data sources globally and locally to spectacular effect. Through the multi-modal tools of crowd-sourcing, co-creation and material making, ‘HyperSext City’ surfaces, activates and amplifies the voices and experiences of a diverse range of people who are not often heard.

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Exhibitions, Symposiums and Intensives

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The Architecture of Multispecies Cohabitation 22 April – 5 June 2021 An exhibition by Feral Partnerships Beth Fisher Levine, Matthew Darmour-Paul, James Powell, Enrico Brondelli di Brondello and Francesca Rausa.

Carp as kitchen helpers. Shadehouses designed to host guests amidst ferns.

Farmhouses where the cattle live downstairs. Decorative dovecotes for the harvest of nutrient-rich fertilisers. Enormous cylindrical towers for human remains to be devoured by vultures...

‘The Architecture of Multispecies Cohabitation’ presents ongoing research by Feral Partnerships of surprising and hopeful stories of human and other-than-human interdependence, facilitated by the architectures that host them.

In the context of anthropogenic global warming and the accelerating extinction of species, the exhibition draws from historical precedents in order to inspire new possibilities for building worlds with the other-than-human in mind. Architects, developers and planners find themselves ever more at the intersection of contested natures. The politics of crisis and the (many) anthropocene(s) have intensified the responsibilities of design and planning towards mitigating climate change and protecting biodiversity.

‘The Architecture of Multispecies Cohabitation’ offers a platform for difficult discussions around the many nonhuman lives that make human life possible, and what is at stake in the production of spatial separation between species, while piecing together an alternative and joyful constellation of meaningful references for designers.

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Emergence 17 June – 31 July 2021 A constellation of research fragments from the Byera Hadley Travelling Scholarship Anna Ewald-Rice, Doug Hamersley, Byron Kinnaird, Tiffany Liew and Eleanor Peres.

‘Emergence’ brings together decades of architectural research from the Byera Hadley Travelling Scholarship in an interactive exhibition and a series of public talks. A collection of 35 diverse research projects have been unveiled from print and digital archives and curated together for the first time in an engaging physical and digital constellation of ideas.

Established in 1951, the scholarship is based on the belief that travel is key to architects, students and graduates developing new architectural ideas, staying connected with the global community and continuing a strong discourse throughout the architectural profession.

What has developed is an exhibition of important knowledge and ideas, which provides a space to reflect, converse and plan for new journeys. ‘Emergence’ hopes to provide a physical forum and digital resource to facilitate these conversations, foster intrigue in architectural research and allow audiences to travel to other communities at this time of restricted movement.

For many recipients, the Byera Hadley Travelling Scholarship is just the beginning of a life-long journey of developing and sharing the ideas first formed by their research projects. ‘Emergence’ aims to be a catalyst itself, raising the profile of this important work, accommodating previously undiscovered connections and fostering curiosity in new architectural research.

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Anne Lacaton & Jean Philippe Vassal Rothwell Symposium: Living in the City – exemplary social and affordable housing design Catherine Lassen, Rothwell Coordinator Sue Lalor, Architectural Chair Project Manager

Exhibitions, Symposiums and Intensives

From 27 to 29 April 2021, the Sydney School of Architecture, Design & Planning, together with 2021 Pritzker Prize Laureates Anne Lacaton & Jean Philippe Vassal, curated the Rothwell Symposium Living in the City. Held in person and online, over three days the free event connected European and Australian architects, urban designers and researchers, to launch Lacaton and Vassal as inaugural Rothwell Co-Chairs 2021 – 2023 at ADP. Highlighting exemplary social and affordable housing design, discussions introduced key aspects of the Rothwell Co-Chair’s three-year agenda, underlining quality housing and its availability as fundamental to the understanding and making of cities. The focus integrated themes echoed in their Pritzker Prize jury citation: 'By prioritising the enrichment of human life through a lens of generosity and freedom of use, … this benefits the individual socially, ecologically and economically, aiding the evolution of a city.'

Australian projects ‘Nightingale’ by Clare Cousins Architects and realisation models such as ‘Assemble’ by Fieldwork in Melbourne, were linked to aligned experiments in Europe. These included Florian Köhl’s Baugruppen ‘Spreefeld’ housing in Berlin, a forerunner of the co-housing model. Swiss architect Andreas Hofer, developer of cooperative housing projects such as Kraftwerk1 and director of the centenary re-evaluation of the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, presented his innovative project in Zürich, ‘mehr als wohnen.’ New housing models by French architect Sophie Delhay re-considered spatial and functional expectations. Christophe Hutin, curator of the French Pavilion at the 2021 Venice architecture Biennale, presented social housing that promoted far greater freedoms for living. London based writer and academic Irénée Scalbert located ‘historical’ modern housing that explored difference and freedom of use in Paris in the 1970s. And contemporary contexts from a political, planning and financial perspective in Sydney were introduced by speakers such as Peter John Cantrill from the City of Sydney and Professor Nicole Gurran, who has written extensively on housing affordability in Australia.

Each evening Lacaton and Vassal joined the conversation as keynote speakers or as part of a panel, their works framed as invitations to re-imagine housing for everyone. Exchanges between Paris and Sydney emphasised thoughtful transformation, of existing buildings, and within the ‘modern’ project. Precisely questioning spatial and construction ‘standards,’ discussions were started. Inventive, affordable and responsible architectural strategies were explored for collectively living well.

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Living in the City Catherine Lassen

Exhibitions, Symposiums and Intensives

Rothwell Research Studio

This intensive design workshop – the first in a series of three annual Master of Architecture Rothwell Studio research electives – invited students to closely consider a selected social and affordable housing context. Participants critically evaluated architectural and urban strategies to identify and catalogue design tactics for appropriation in contemporary Sydney.

The workshop built on the Rothwell Symposium (27-29.04.2021) to examine issues associated with the program led by the inaugural Rothwell co-chairs and 2021 Pritzker Prize Laureates, French architects Anne Lacaton and Jean Philippe Vassal.

Their nominated agenda “Living well in the big city” integrated themes echoed in their Pritzker Prize jury citation: ‘By prioritising the enrichment of human life through a lens of generosity and freedom of use … this benefits the individual socially, ecologically and economically, aiding the evolution of a city.’

In this course, students extended questions raised in the symposium to critically research and precisely document aspects of a nominated social housing project in Sydney. Designed by architect Tao Gofers in 1978-79 and completed in 1980, former public housing apartment building Sirius in the Rocks was controversially sold in 2019 for private redevelopment. Selected for its architectural, urban and social ambitions, together with a focus on individual inhabitants and qualities that frame an imagined life, the building has been associated with architectural ‘Brutalism,’ a development within late modernism. Previously framed as brutal and ‘ugly’ public housing, from June 2021 private ‘luxury’ 1-bedroom apartments in the Sirius building were available from a cost of $1.7 million. One penthouse was sold for a reported $35 million.

Students considered this transformation from ugly social housing block to luxury apartment complex, to examine what we might learn from Sirius via themes such as housing quality, ecology, economy, affordability and social impact. The studio asked: What is luxury? Beauty? Generosity in architecture?

Using archival and historical research, data collection, numerical analysis, collage techniques together with measured architectural drawings, students worked in groups to develop close readings of Sirius. These materials helped focus historical, cultural, economic and disciplinary issues, investigating housing that can provide, ‘luxury for everyone’.

Rothwell Co-Chairs Anne Lacaton Jean-Philippe Vassal Tutors Peter John Cantrill Catherine Lassen External contributors and guest critics Hannes Frykholm, Rothwell Postdoctoral Associate Tao Gofers, architect David Shoebridge, NSW Greens MP Philip Thalis, architect + City of Sydney Councillor

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Community in Context: Standards & Space Jacob Levy, Isabella Mrljiak, Emma O'Brien, Alexander Prichard

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the Sirius situation Thomas Chen, Sophie Corr, Mackenzie Nix, Miriam Osburn

STUDENT EXCELLENCE AND SPONSORS

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School of Architecture, Design and Planning

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Australian Institute of Architects NSW Chapter Brian Patrick Keirnan Prize Ryan Dingle

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Awards, Prizes and Scholarships

Postgraduate Prizes and Scholarships Bates Smart Prize for Architectural Design Celine Noviany Bluescope Lysaght Prize in Architectural Design Tze Kang Wesley Fong

Cox Architecture Scholarship Angela Xu Ethel M Chettle Prize in Architecture Matthew Asimakis Blake Davis Jackson Birrell Alvin Hui George McRae Prize in Architectural Construction Alvin Hui Henry J Cowan Prize in Architectural Science Connor Tan Emily Flanagan

James Hartley Bibby Memorial Prize in Architectural Design Miriam Osburn Jun Hyung Hwang Ruskin Rowe Prize for Architecture Nicholas Bucci Sir John Sulman Prize in Architectural Design Nicholas Bucci Sunlord Perpetual Prize in Architectural Design James Wen Yu Zhou Feng

CHL Turner Memorial Prize in Architectural Design William Clarke Henry J Cowan Prize in Architectural Science Yinuo Chen Kevin Luu Arthur Baldwinson Memorial Scholarship in Architectural History Marcus Kalaf Burnham Prize in Urban Planning and Architecture Kaveen Wickremaratchy Elizabeth Munro Prize in Architecture Anton Luc Bucich Leslie Wilkinson Prize in Architectural History and Theory Dylan Harry Liren Froude

Australian Institute of Architects NSW Chapter Awards Brian Patrick Keirnan Prize Ryan Dingle Commendation – Brian Patrick Keirnan Prize Lucy Sharman 2021 MADE by the Opera House Scholarship Rhys Grant Arissara Reed

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Conrad Gargett Prize Selina Wang

Undergraduate Prizes and Scholarships

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Sponsors The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning would like to thank the following sponsors for their generosity in making the 2021 Graduate Exhibition possible.

School of Architecture, Design and Planning

Platinum

Gold

Silver

Bronze

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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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171 Monash Woodside Building for Technology and Design Melbourne, Australia

Recipient of the Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Architecture, Australian Institute of Architects National Awards

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Bates Smart would like to congratulate 2021’s graduates!

Looking for career opportunities?

We are on the lookout for current students and recent graduates.

For more information and to apply, please visit batessmart.com

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STUDENT PROGRAMS

Graduating 2023 Cadet Program Game Changers Club Career Compass Program

Could the skills you learn here unlock doors anywhere?

Graduating 2021 Graduating 2022

Graduate Program

Vacationer Program

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Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning ISBN: 978-0-6484458-3-8