Students’ exhibition celebrates up and coming architects

Students’ exhibition celebrates up and coming architects

Students from the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland have cause for celebration following their recent clean sweep at industry design competitions.

Final-year students in the Master of Architecture (Professional) programme won all the prizes at New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) Graphisoft Student Design Awards as well as taking out first place in the student section of the Auckland Architecture Association (AAA) Unbuilt Architecture Awards.

To celebrate their extraordinary success, an exhibition of the award-winning architectural projects will go on display next week, allowing the public a chance to view the designs of our up and coming architects. Called 5 Futures, the exhibition features work by Marianne Calvelo, Sacha Milojevic, Raphaela Rose, Nathan Swaney and Holly Xie.

Every year four significant final-year projects are nominated from each of the Country’s architecture schools to compete in the NZIA Graphisoft Student Design Awards. 5 Futures includes Marianne Calvelo‘s Mad Women: Public Domesticity (finalist), Nathan Swaney’s Extraction Lands and the Permanence of Production (highly commended), Sacha Milojevic’s Newmarket Campus as a Porous Megaform (highly commended) and Raphaela Rose’s Sexu(ality) and the City: Counteracting the Cock-ups of Auckland’s Main Strip which won the top prize.

Rose’s project presented a critique of the perceived commercial and sexual exploitation of the area containing the Sky Tower, a centerpiece of Auckland city, and offered a whimsical adult amusement park in its place. Her design was described by the NZIA as ‘achieving the rare feat of combining architecture, parody and political and sexual folly into a stylish, sparely drawn package’.

Also on display is architecture student Holly Xie’s thesis Vanishing Acts. Pronounced by the judges as a ‘tour de force of architectural exploration’ it won first prize from amongst 125 submissions in the student category of the much-coveted 2013 AAA Unbuilt Architecture Awards. Vanishing Acts features an intricately imagined landscape referencing the history of a remote and contested sub Antarctic island.

5 Futures
George Fraser Gallery
25a Princes Street
Opening 5.30pm, Tuesday 18 March
Exhibition runs from 11am-4pm, 19-22 March
Email info-georgefraser@auckland.ac.nz

The University of Auckland’s National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries comprises the Elam School of Fine Arts, School of Architecture and Planning, the Centre for Art Research, the School of Music and the Dance Studies Programme.

ENDS

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