Now we move on from our own Faculty's graduation exhibitions to those of the other design/architecture/planning/construction schools in Sydney, starting with the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney (UTS INDEX2011 will be next). Titled aMaze, the faculty-wide graduation exhibition brings together student projects from various undergraduate & postgraduate studios, including the architecture masters graduation and third year architecture programs. I didn't have the opportunity to visit the exhibition on opening night and tried my best to make sense of the exhibition the following day, with much difficulty to say the least. The exhibition itself was scattered throughout the architecture faculty building with very few directional signs, alluding to the 'Maze' theme of the exhibition which was further establish through the partial creation of maze like corridors using props and white plastic. Although I am sure this setup seemed like a good idea on the night I was slightly taken aback by the potential environmental implications of such a design decision in a exhibition that is showcasing the next generation of architects and what this said about the value the architecture school placed on sustainable design. When I visited the exhibition the day after the opening night, the white plastic screens were torn apart in some places and the connection between the 'aMaze' maze and the rubbish tip didn't seem all that distant from the bad design practices of the past. Unless of course this white plastic was in fact biodegradable and no one had told me, in which case the exhibition should have put up a sigh to that effect. This was another problem with the exhibition, there were very few posters actually explaining the the briefs and the projects being displayed. Overall the whole aMaze theme seemed like code for bad communication in an exhibition that simply didn't want to let me know what was going on.
This left me struggling to understand whether I was looking at a first year architecture studio project or a third year graduation project. It was equally difficult to make sense of what degree/major was on display and what themes and ideas a project was dealing with. It seemed strange to me to separate a model from its accompanying poster and a poster from its accompanying folio, particularly when you consider that one of the fundamental skills a graduating architecture student requires is an ability to clearly communicate an idea. But this was just the setup in the biggest room of the exhibition and what it did was create a lot of unnecessary noise. It was incredibly difficult to consume an idea/scheme when one was posed with the challenge of finding a folio and then a poster of the same scheme; the models might have as well been completely absent (I'm not even sure if they belonged to the same year as the third year posters). Overwhelmed by this overcomplex task I started comparing the technical skills of our USYD colleagues and it seems they place a much greater value on graphic presentation, all the posters and accompanying folios (yes it looks like they needed to have multipage folio books) were very well designed/composed, though by themselves they did little to full communicate the complexity of most the schemes. Physical models seemed to have been considered of lesser importance at USYD than UNSW and many of the models weren't incredibly engaging, despite being beautifully constructed (almost all of the time). The modelled schemes came across as being oversimplified past the point of a meaningful communication of an idea into an idealised situation that would never be replicated in reality. The accompanying exhibition publication perhaps alludes to the reason for this as an attempt "to pare back formal complexity to find something essential and articulate" by the students /staff.
Interestingly enough, the value of what we are being taught at the Built Environment seemed to have been justified by this graduation exhibition at USYD. The varied approach to the communication of an idea/scheme, the value of taking a humanist approach to design and of course the value of environmental sustainability in design all seemed to have a stronger presence in the UNSW M.Arch & B.ArchStudies graduation exhibition than was revealed at USYD's aMaze.
The exhibition is on until Friday 9th December, more details here.
