Future bank captures Italy’s design capital
by Michèle Nardelli
There is a subtle synchronicity in a former electrician, now a 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 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.
On one level his design has the most elegant simplicity and on another it is extraordinarily futuristic.
Jason Chambers’ bank branch of the future is a pod-like carriage. Plugged in and powered by a solar energy docking station, the "pods" can be inserted into the regular solar light train commuter service. The pods offer an airport lounge style interior with transaction stations designed for three levels of customer service from the most basic including purchasing tickets and ATM facilities, right through to more complex private banking. The interface is friendly and service oriented with places for people to relax and read or drink coffee and a concierge to assist the travelling public.
"I have tried to bring together threads that link the design with factors that develop community – so the entry was titled ‘sustainable motion’ – to emphasize movement, progress, energy and the whole process of banking at a human and social level," he says.
Senior Lecturer for the Masters 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.
"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."
Chambers was flown to Italy’s design capital, Turin at the end of May to collect his €2000 first prize.