Receiving the Excellence in Design Award
Swinburne University of Technology Graduate Exhibition 2023
2023 was a milestone year, as I completed the Bachelor of Design (Interior Architecture)(Honours) at Swinburne University of Technology. To celebrate our hard work throughout our four-year degree, Swinburne hosted a Graduate Exhibition (GradX) award ceremony.
At this event, I received the Excellence in Design Award for receiving the highest GPA (grade point average) in my graduating class. It was an incredible honour to be recognised for my hard work and passion for architecture and heritage.
On the exhibition's opening night, we met with family, friends, and industry professionals to present our honours year capstone projects. Our research and design development theme was the reuse and revitalisation of underutilised spaces. As an aspiring Conservation Architect with a passion for preserving heritage, it was important to me to choose spaces that were disconnected from the community and their heritage and to focus on ways to reconnect community to place.
I proposed two design concepts for the revitalisation of two buildings in very different and unique communities. One represented the saving of tangible built heritage, The Collingwood Sailors and Soldiers Memorial Hall, built in 1924 to commemorate fallen Soldiers of World War I, which has since been abandoned for many years. The other focused on the cultural intangible heritage of a Vietnamese community and looked to revitalise their new community centre, which was a concrete warehouse that lacked any evidence of their cultural identity. This was for the Australian Vietnamese Women’s Association.
I strongly believe in the importance of looking at the buildings we already have to see their value and how they can meet the individual needs of communities rather than be lost to time due to neglect. Our heritage is in the built environment, we live, work, play, connect, and share with communities in buildings and we have a responsibility to protect this legacy into the future.
I feel incredibly excited about my future career in Heritage Conservation and will continue devoting the same passion I have for my studies to my desire to helping reconnect people to place.
