24hrs of avant-garde architecture challenges

The annual mid-July fiesta began with a runway show at Point Chevalier RSA, where teams met for the first time and sought to design and realise architecture inspired haute couture. The red carpet saw goggles derived from Athfield’s Khandallah home, multi-purpose masks celebrating Tirau’s famous corrugated canine, and the sassiest Sydney Opera House (complete with detachable fan to flutter at a seductive leading tenor). This icebreaker challenge was judged by long-running sponsor Sika’s Melissa Stuckey and Sheets By Salas’ very own Carl Salas. Team 13’s ‘Fan-tom of the Opera’ (modelled by Rachel Ogbuze) fluttered its way into first place, and an honourable mention went to the vogue-like charisma of Phoebe Rodriguez, modelling team 2’s Guggenheim inspired neckpiece.

That evening, the 70 students assembled from the nation’s six architecture schools headed to Unitec’s Building 48 to tackle a challenging brief, asking for the city’s new architecture school to be tied in with the City Rail Link — Auckland’s new railway line linking Mt Eden, Karangahape Road, and Aotea Square to Britomart. The challenge? Sites like Mars or a polar landscape required some slight modifications to our newest piece of infrastructure: rails delving through volcanoes, under oceans, and far off into the cold, unforgiving vacuum of space. Teams worked hard to conceptualise and begin their media processes, and many continued to work at home after the studios closed for the night.

Saturday morning greeted students with a ridiculous curveball (in keeping with 24hr tradition): the students at this school were not humans, but animals. A unique member of the animal kingdom was assigned to each team; throwing in yet another variable to balance in answering the brief. Some teams chose to cohabitate with humans, others chose to trick us into Mars holidays as a food source for octo-Martian students, and others still chose to use bovine academics as a food source for their holistic farm-to-table concept schools. Interesting discourse from the judging table ensued: it seems opinions on the ethics of eating one’s classmates are contingent on whether humans are the eaters or the eaten.

Our group of plucky young architects slowly transitioned from bright-eyed, bushy tailed designers meeting from the first time to mad scientists working together, emerging from piles of Resene paints and sliced-up cardboard only to consume dinners and lunches provided by Sheets by Salas and Burgerfuel. The 24hr competition aims to build inter-school networks by drawing out the very best design ideas through ridiculous constraints and allow newly-introduced designers to achieve both conceptual and media outcomes that go far beyond what is expected in school and in practice — and often we find social critique emerging from the melting pot of ideas and ideologies. One team critiqued members of the establishment: ‘absolutely no sense of social responsibility and winning the rat race is all that’s important to them,’ while team 5 asked the burning question: ‘why did the ant go to architecture school?

Our judges were indeed impressed with the proposals put in front of them at the prizegiving (taking place at Citizen Park in Kingsland). A special prize for best presenter went to team 15’s scroll reader Dylan Andrew Hagan, announcing the Frog King’s wish to see amphibian architects educated in Auckland. Team 6 cemented third place with a ship-school for penguins navigating a perilous icefield, replete with a set of matching penguin hats for presentation. Taking second place was team 1 with a stunning and unexpected found-audio style diary depicting the collapse of a mars-based utopia. Team 10 ultimately took out first place, depicting an underworld architecture school staffed by starchitects like Zaha Hadead, Frank Lloyd Left, and Le Corpsie (whose responsibilities as faculty included bringing new students into the underworld, with all the murderous implications that entails). Some flattery of the judging team (adjectives included: sexy; successful; stunning) — envisioned as the school’s occult founders — did not go amiss as the team presented their Unitec-based underworld institution’s upcoming prospectus. Teams took home puzzle-piece medals designed by Adam Collett of SANNZ Unitec, and bragging rights for a triumphant return to next year’s competition.

And why did the ant go to architecture school? To get ant-elligent, of course!

The 24hr competition is SANNZ’s largest calendar event and it comes back bigger and better every year. This year’s competition was our 10th and marked Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland University of Technology’s first official participation as a SANNZ-affiliated university.

The comp (and SANNZ) is organised by students, for students, as the student outreach of the NZIA. For more information on this year’s competition and the SANNZ kaupapa (or to get involved), visit us at sannz.org.

Thank you to this year’s judging panel:

Congratulations to the winning teams:

• 1st place – Team 10 (the Bent Tents): Matthew Brown (Unitec), Danielle Caballero (UoA), Hayley Harris (UoA), Gregory Mann (UoA), Liang-Ru Kiana Wei (UoA)
• 2nd place – Team 1 (Good Shout Studios): Yash Bhatia (UoA), Simon Jo (UoA), Josh Hamilton (Unitec), Rachel Lin (UoA), Tom Peng (UoA)
• 3rd place – Team 6 (FETZ): Tristan Escueta (Otago Polytechnic), Erica Lim (Unitec), Felix Qi (Unitec), Eric Wong (UoA), Zoe Wu (UoA)

Thank you to our 2023 sponsors, without whom this incredible event would not be possible:

Finally, a special thank you to SANNZ UoA – embodying SANNZ’ goals with some serious inter-school assistance.

Sahil Tiku is a SANNZ National Representative (based at the University of Auckland).