Students from the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland have cause for celebration following their recent clean sweep at industry design competitions. Final-year students in the Master of Architecture (Professional) programme won all the prizes at New Zealand Institute of Architects (NZIA) Graphisoft Student Design Awards as well as taking out first place in the student section of the Auckland Architecture Association (AAA) Unbuilt Architecture Awards.

To celebrate this success, the award-winning architectural projects will be on display next week (Wednesday 19 – Saturday 22, March). Called 5 Futures, the exhibition features work by Marianne Calvelo Mad Women: Public Domesticity, Sacha Milojevic Newmarket Campus as a Porous Megaform, Nathan Swaney Extraction Lands and the Permanence of Production and Raphaela Rose Sex(uality) and the City: Counteracting the Cock-ups of Auckland’s Main Strip, which won the top prize.

Rose’s project presented a critique of the perceived commercial and sexual exploitation of the area containing the Sky Tower, a centerpiece of Auckland city, and offered a whimsical adult amusement park in its place. Her design was described by the NZIA as ‘achieving the rare feat of combining architecture, parody and political and sexual folly into a stylish, sparely drawn package’.

Also on display is architecture student Holly Xie’s thesis Vanishing Acts. Pronounced by the judges as a ‘tour de force of architectural exploration’ it won first prize from amongst 125 submissions in the student category of the much-coveted 2013 AAA Unbuilt Architecture Awards. Vanishing Acts features an intricately imagined landscape referencing the history of a remote and contested sub-Antarctic island.

5 Futures
George Fraser Gallery
25a Princes Street
Opening night 5.30pm, Tuesday 18 March
Exhibition runs from 11am-4pm, 19-22 March.