AAA CavBrem Award Winners for 2009

Two joint winners were declared in the Open section of the annual Auckland Architecture Association Cavalier Bremworth Design Awards, held on Thursday 19 November.

Designed to reward design excellence in unbuilt architecture, the judges were equally impressed with an entry from Patterson Associates for lighting up the Auckland Harbour Bridge, described by the judges as "evocative, transformative and doable" and a display prototype entitled Cupcake from Auckland practise Oh.no.sumo which was used to sell cupcakes for charity. 

    

International guest judge Camilla Block, from leading Sydney architectural practise Durbach Block, was joined on the judging panel by Victoria University lecturer in architecture Simon Twose and Auckland architect Aaron Patterson. They were unanimous in their selection of winners and all loved the sculptural forms of the Cupcake prototype and the potential shown for illuminating one of Auckland's icons.

The judges said Cupcake was playful scheme illustrated by a temporary cardboard model that showed a different kind of making based on material as the first step. "With form not image as the aim. The fact that it sold cupcakes for charity only adds to the aw shucks ...."

The winning student entry from AUT spatial design student Yosop Ryoo entitled "The No Man's Land" focused on the Symonds St graveyard areas that have been torn apart through the last century. His entry featured an incredibly detailed model and hand-crafted companion book.  The judges praised his models as the finest in the room, exhibiting delicate cutting repetition, fine materials and cinematic moves.

    

"It is the kind of project where the objects draw you to their depths. To understand how clearly it identified an urban rift in the fabric around the cemetery, its neglected state, and proposing a beautifully wrought rejuvenation: the swaying enclosure, the system of nods and blinks, the finely crafted graphics. If the philosophy is at times impenetrable it is likely our failure not the designers."

 

Merit awards in the Open section were also awarded to a joint entry from Jasmax and Dry Dairy for a project called Rubix Muse and to Jason Dobbs for a pointedly confounding board game on Auckland architectural planning.

    

Runner-up in the student section was Mohamed Kheir for an intricately drawn entry entitled The Stratified Lines of Deterritorialisation. Student merit awards were also presented to Hye Ran Lee and James Moore.

    

    

 

 

 

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