Winners announced at Visionary Architecture Awards 2019
From left to right: Nicole Teh (Post-graduate category and Supreme winner), Felicity Brenchley (judge), Jingyuan Huang (Undergraduate category winner), William King (Work in progress category winner), Gina Hochstein (judge) and Icao Tiseli (judge).
Nicole Teh’s winning project, Combobulation Station, reassembles “familiar items into new uncanny tools for climate change”.
The 2019 Visionary Architecture Awards were held on 28 February and honoured 35 shortlisted projects for their uninhibited conceptual thinking.
From Nicole Teh’s project Combobulation Station: Uncanny Architecture for Uncommon Objects, which won the Post-graduate and Supreme Awards.
From the winning project in the Conceptual category, Codex of the Third Landscape by Dan Castro.
Between Art, Activism and Architecture by Jingyuan Huang won the Undergraduate category.
The winner of the Work in Progress category was Te Whanau Hou Hut by William King.
The Auckland Architecture Association held their annual Visionary Architecture Awards on 28 February, with the Supreme award going to University of Auckland graduate Nicole Teh for her project Combobulation Station: Uncanny Architecture for Uncommon Objects. Teh also won the Post-graduate category.
The Conceptual category at the 2019 Awards was won by Dan Castro, a Victoria University of Wellington graduate, for his project Codex of the Third Landscape. And, the winner of the Undergraduate category was Jingyuan Huang, a University of Auckland BArch graduate, with Between Art, Activism and Architecture. University of Auckland MArch student William King won the Work in Progress category with his Te Whanau Hou Hut project.
The awards aim to honour projects that show an “unrestrained conceptual process”. Judges noted that Teh’s Supreme-winning project, which stems from her MArch thesis, “reinvents objects of the Anthropocene through an architectural investigation of a community recycling centre. By reassembling familiar items into new uncanny tools for climate change, the proposal triggers a reflection on the traces we leave, from objects to urban developments.”
They continued, “It is a powerful yet subtle critique of the current conversation about the ecological crisis, communicated in a captivating visual language that feels familiar yet new; a distorted version of reality. Combobulation Station offers an immersive experience of a visionary development of our epoch which, although represented as a fictional proposal, confronts us with the reality of our profession’s significant anthropocenic footprint.”
This year’s winners were chosen by a panel of judges that included Felicity Brenchley of Ākau, Magdalena Garbarczyk of CZYK Studio and Unitec, Gina Hochstein of the University of Auckland and Icao Tiseli of Jasmax. They commended all 35 shortlisted projects for showing “high quality, diversity, thoughtfulness and clarity of communication”.
The AAA reports that, though the Visionary Architecture Awards is usually held at the close of each year, the 2019 event was held during university orientation week “in order to get the new year off to a stimulating start.”
Images and more information about all the winning and highly commended projects as well as runners-up will be available on the AAA website.
