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"Out of a dead space, they wanted to create a place where people could congregate.” That’s how newly recruited Architecture lecturer Assistant Professor Kirill de Lancastre Jedenov described the cave-like structure made from 3,500 beer and wine cartons that, for one week, became the central, imaginative focus of a corner of the UWA campus.

In another outdoor corridor on the Nedlands site, a more dynamic work using up-lit, plastic cups hung by string in groups at different elevations has been constantly swinging and flowing in the breeze.

The projects were among a display of 45 temporary installations dotted throughout the open spaces around the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts buildings, impressive not least for the recycled materials used to construct them but also for their shape, form and colour.

The second year Integrated Design unit project aims to teach students the importance of drawing by getting them to build a structure without drafting, modelling or drawing.

The brief was to create a new spatial quality sympathetic to its surroundings. The 180 second year students worked in groups over five weeks to come up with the designs which took up to a week to construct.

Assistant Professor de Lancastre Jedenov brought the idea from his home country of Portugal having developed the project with students at Universidade Lusófona de Lisboa and The University of Innsbruck in Austria. Together with Associate Professor Sophie Giles they designed a brief for second year Integrated Design students.

“It’s good for students to understand fairly quickly that they can do things,” Kirill said. “It creates an opportunity for learning by doing. It also gives them the opportunity to make mistakes and to learn from that.”

In the adjacent Faculty of Education building Dean Helen Wildy would keep the temporary beer and wine carton cave in the atrium if she could, as an example of what she would like to see more of across other disciplines as part of the Education Futures project that will see the University change the way it delivers teaching.

“We need to be working in that higher order of learning that is; applying, critiquing, evaluating and creating,” Professor Wildy said.

“This is a great example of students being set a task where they are free to be creative, express themselves and work at that level of higher order learning. It has brought together teamwork, trust and problem solving. I love the fact that when the shelter started to collapse in the middle the students made the new shape into a feature where you can sit.”

The designs drew interest and positive comments from visitors saying they appreciated seeing something new going on over the week of construction. Kirill hopes next year he will be able to give the students more space for their installations on the main campus grounds.

Media references

Assistant Professor Kirill de Lancastre Jedenov | Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts | +61 6488 1674

Aleta Johnson | UWA Media | +61 6488 7977

Laura Radovan | Faculty Marketing and Communications | +61 6488 1859