Victoria University student Gerard Finch was presented with a Highly Commended award in the Central Innovation Student Design Award competition, winning $1500 prize money for his original design.
His project was a complex zero-waste system for prefab architecture, ensuring every component is designed for reuse — potentially groundbreaking, since 50% of all waste in NZ comes from the construction industry.
The competition was between Architecture students from Victoria University, University of Auckland, and Unitec.
Finch said, “My work is a bit out of the box for this competition, so receiving the Highly Commended was great”.
Speaking on behalf of Victoria University’s Faculty of Architecture and Design, Professor Brown highlighted the importance of ingenuity in Architecture: “Students were looking at non-traditional solutions to traditional problems.”
Other Victoria University students’ designs created for competition included Stacey Mountfort’s design for integrating nature into architecture, Ryan McCully’s idea to incorporate relics of heritage buildings destroyed in earthquakes to preserve historical architecture, and Jessica Wright’s manifesto of the digital era that encourages hand-drawn architectural designs.