Visual Journals by Students

These journal pages were completed in India and Rome by students attending the Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Architecture and Design course “International Design Studio” taught by Daniel K. Brown.

“International Design Studio” brought together students from multiple years and multiple design disciplines: Architecture, Interior Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Industrial Design. These four disciplines represent significantly diverse scales – and subsequently unique approaches to design. In critiquing one another’s work, students were therefore required to draw from points of view distinctly different from those traditionally applied to their own disciplines. “International Design Studio” engaged students in an intensive cross-cultural exploration of designed objects, spaces and sites with a particular emphasis on understanding why and how they are uniquely formed by the cultural, historical and technological contexts of which they are a part.

The theme of the studio was Ritual, Symbolism and Artefact, and the aim was to challenge each student to recognize and – most importantly – critically interpret significant examples of ritual, symbolism and artefact as a means of providing a meaningful basis for provocative and richly innovative discipline-specific contemporary design interpretation. Students were intensively instructed in drawing techniques with which they could most effectively record and translate these themes. During the six weeks overseas, each student independently researched, observed, experimented, documented and translated formal and spatial discipline-specific examples of ritual, symbolism and artefact witnessed directly in Indian culture. The drawings represent discoveries made, presumptions challenged, and imagination awakened.

Assistants: Lee Gibson, Adam Alexander, and Erika Kruger

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