Student work and experiences - Architecture
Jason Chambers
Final Year Architecture
Student Prize
There is a subtle synchronicity in a former electrician and final-year student in the professional Masters in Architecture, winning an international award for a design concept that in part focuses on alternative power. But it was definitely an understanding of community and global environmental concerns and a creative approach to the design challenge that clinched a win for UniSA's Jason Chambers in the student category of the Panini Design Contest to design a bank branch of the future.
With strong competition from more than 270 student and professional entries around the world, Chambers' winning concept drew together notions of how banks might operate to encourage both community engagement and sustainable power in an alienated and environmentally degraded future world. 'I imagined the design in the context of a social story about how life might be, also acknowledging that banks have continued to lose community trust and have become depersonalised and sometimes even demonised,' he said.
Jason's design is both ambitious and socially courageous and it shows he has looked beyond a superficial notion of the contest to imagine the social and enterprise needs of the future. It is a wonderful win and made even more exciting by the fact that the competition organisers commented that all five entries from UniSA students were outstanding in their creativity and skill.
Senior Lecturer for the Master of Architecture program, Rachel Hurst, says the win is a wonderful endorsement of a new approach to teaching in the courses. 'We have concentrated on developing research principles into our teaching so that we encourage every design project to be tackled and interrogated as a series of research questions. Every student will complete a competition entry for a major design contest, and across the six projects for the year we have involvement from different nationally recognised architects, who come in to support and inform students' work from the professional practice standpoint.'
Media release (The Student)