The University of Sydney Architecture Graduate Exhibition has begun

Designs for the Bays Precinct, high-density housing, and public architecture around Sydney’s Domain, Hyde Park and Oxford Street are among the architectural challenges that University of Sydney graduating students are presenting in the 2017 Architecture Graduate Exhibition.

On display are more than 240 architectural models and drawings created by graduating students of the Master of Architecture and two undergraduate architecture programs, including the first student cohort of the Bachelor of Architecture and Environments degree introduced three years ago.

Dr François Blanciak, designer of this year’s graduate show and Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, said: “The exhibition is designed around the idea of extending our reach towards the city. We call it a work of ‘exhibition urbanism’. It features a series of structures illustrating a large dotted circle that travels out of the Wilkinson Building, as a means of unifying the different architecture degrees, spaces and student works presented across the exhibition.”

To understand metropolitan systems, politics and urban development patterns, Masters students were asked to develop designs for the Bays Precinct. Working on precinct master plans, each student created their own architectural designs for landmark sites, including the White Bay Power Station and Glebe Island Peninsular.

Another Masters student group considered the ever-growing problem of housing affordability in Sydney, and developed designs for innovative housing proposals between the inner-city suburbs of Kensington and Kingsford. Their speculative designs provide clever housing solutions that looked equally at architectural and urban issues and accommodated a wide range of functional requirements.

The third and largest display of Masters work probed the theme ‘Xenophilia’ – valuing others, foreign people, cultures and customs – to rethink architecture as a way of addressing cultural difference. With this theme in mind, students developed designs for public architecture around Sydney’s Hyde Park and Oxford Street. The designs engage with issues of community, diversity and an increasingly multi-cultural and multi-cultured society.

Bachelor of Architecture and Environments students present their final year concepts for a hypothetical, 3,500-square-metre museum in Sydney’s Inner West – taking into consideration the dense and diverse Annandale/Camperdown precinct and the WestConnex and Parramatta Road Urban Transformation projects.

Jørn Utzon’s architectural thinking also provided inspirational background for Bachelor of Design in Architecture students to develop their own vision and designs for a public meeting and performance space on the edge of the Domain behind the Sydney Mint.

The 2017 Architecture Graduate Exhibition at the University of Sydney was officially opened by Dr Deborah Dearing, President of the NSW Architects Registration Board, on 30 November. The exhibition is on display until 16 December 2017.

Event Details:
When: 30 November  – 16 December 2017
Where: University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, Wilkinson Building, 148 City Road, Darlington
archgradshow17.com