Sydney Architecture Festival brings unbuilt architecture projects to life through virtual reality exhibition

Australia’s exhibition from the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale will be premiered in Australia as part of the 2014 Sydney Architecture Festival, which runs from 1 until 10 November 2014 at locations across greater Sydney.   Augmented Australia 1914 – 2014 is a virtual exhibition launching on the eve of the Festival and presented free of charge until 15 December 2014 at Sydney’s Customs House and experienced by downloading a free smartphone app. 

Augmented Australia 1914-2014 pushes the boundaries between architecture and technology, taking visitors on a virtual journey of 22 of Australia’s most intriguing unrealised architecture projects. It showcases 11 historical and 11 contemporary projects from around the country designed over the past one hundred years that, for various reasons, were never built.  Virtual 3D models, images, voiceovers and animations, activated by the specially designed Augmented Australia App, will bring the projects to life giving visitors a unique insight into the projects that could have been.

Varying in scale and typology, the projects include an alternative vision for the Sydney Opera House and a Roman Catholic pilgrimage site in Western Australia. Other projects include a different design for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, a new ’skin’ for Sydney’s UTS building and a different concept for the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park. Australia’s new pavilion in Venice by Denton Corker Marshall, currently under construction, also features in the exhibition.

2014 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize presented to an international artist, Natalie Guy, for the first time in its 14-year history

The 2014 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize has been awarded to an international artist for the first time since its conception in 2001. New Zealand artist Natalie Guy (pictured above) received the $15,000 main acquisitive prize for her work, Form for modern living #2, a five-kilogram bronze cast of a reworked plywood school-chair.

The Prize, Australia's pre-eminent national prize for small sculpture, and received a record number of entries this year.  Ms. Guy's sculpture was one of  45 finalists chosen from the nearly 600 works submitted.

Ms. Guy's artwork is an extension of pseudo-modernist sculptures which she began creating in 2012. It explores the nature of collection and exhibition on the public and private spheres, and is influenced by the familiarity of domestic interiors. The artwork also draws upon celebrated British sculptor Barbara Hepworth's series of Forms.

Form for modern living #2 will be acquired into Woollahra Council's permanent public collection.

Light installation to be unveiled at Sydney Architecture Festival as part of guided laneways tour

A three dimensional light installation, HEXTIC, will fascinate visitors to the Sydney Architecture Festival at Grasshopper Bar, Temperance Lane in Sydney's CBD from 1 to 10 November 2014. 

Free to the public, HEXTIC will come alive in Festival evenings, pulsating with light and responding to sound levels through embedded audio sensors that trigger dynamic images created by LED lighting. 

The installation was designed by UNSW students of the Australian School of Architecture and Design led by Dr Hank Haeusler, Rebekah Araullo and Eliot Rosenberg.

In keeping the spotlight on lane ways, a guided walking tour of Sydney's lane ways, 'Covert Connections', will be presented on Monday 3 November from 5:30pm to 8pm. Tickets are free, but bookings are required and can be made here.

MPavillion, designed by internationally acclaimed architect Sean Godsell, launches in Melbourne

On Monday 6 October, the inaugural MPavilion was unveiled in Melbourne's Queen Victoria Gardens. It is the first in a major new series of annual architecture commissions led by the Naomi Milgrom Foundation. Free to the public, it will be presented from 7 October 2014 to 1 February 2015.

This MPavilion was designed by architect Sean Godsell who recently won the International Architecture Award of the Chicago Athenaeum Museum and the National Award for Public Architecture at the AIA Awards 2014.

The public program includes talks, workshops, music events, film screenings, walking and bike tours, art interventions and dance performances, staged as part of the Melbourne Festival.

Upon the conclusion of its public display, the MPavilion will be presented to the City of Melbourne, creating a legacy of contemporary architecture.

A full program and more information on the project can be viewed here.