UNSW Faculty of the Built Environment Society (fbesoc): COFA Annual 2011

Congratulations to our graduating compadres over at COFA!

This year the COFA Annual was held at the Roundhouse/Squarehouse on campus (which is a seriously smaller venue than CarriageWorks where the Annual was held last year) and boy did the COFA kids put on a show! Cramming every single space with either an artwork, design project or a media presentation. There was plenty of good ideas, technical skills & engaging presentations on show which really highlighted some of the differences between COFA & the FBE.

The most striking of these being the value placed by COFA graduates on presentations that engage the viewer, asking them to interact, touch, feel, understand through experience. When compared to the FBE graduation exhibition also visited in recent weeks (M.Arch, B.ArchStudies & B.ArchComp) the COFA Annual was a completely different experience. At the FBE we seem to care less about the communication of an idea and focus more on the idea itself and although this can be see as a positive, it is also a negative when an idea is hard to explain (or when the idea just isn't that good in the first place). At both the Masters of Architecture and Bachelor of Architecture Studies graduation exhibition the projects were generally presented in quite an un-engaging (some would say dull) banner/poster + model format and although this worked well for some the majority were let down by their poor graphic design/presentation skills. While the presentations at the COFA Annual were carefully considered, being designed to be viewed/digested quickly and understood in the exhibition environment.

Another interesting difference (or similarity?) between COFA & the FBE was the Environments projects which most closely sailed to what we do at the FBE. These project seemed to focus exclusively on a spatial experience. I was a bit confused to say the least about what these projects were actually about and found myself critiquing them architecturally but then being puzzled by whether they were intended to be architecture in the first place. It was interesting viewing these and seeing how the user was treated/valued through the presence of human figures in all the Environments projects, an element that was mostly missing from the architecture grad projects.

The COFA Annual reflected the varied approach to design taken by our sister design faculty, an approach that seemed to ask students to consider the user(s) response throughout their project, from the original conceptualisation of an idea to the final presentation (a humanist approach to design?).

See more graduation projects at the COFA Annual website.

Also, read the tharunka review here.