EXHIBITION 2023: Victoria University of Wellington School of Architecture

3 – 19 March 2023

The exhibition represents a collection of allegorical architectural projects – stories about environmental destruction, social disparities, and cultural loss – told through the voice of speculative architecture.

An installation composed of speculative architectural drawings that chart the fantastical and curious spaces of the famous novel by Gabriel García Márquez, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’. The novel’s architectural setting is the Buendía house, and the in-between space of its courtyard coalesces the magical-real situations of the family. The installation Magical-Real Courtyard re-presents this magical-real courtyard in the gallery as a large, inhabitable mapping. Visitors are invited to wander and ponder on its surface, encountering the novel’s shifting perspectives on time, space, and reality through an architectural and experimental lens. Using mapping strategies such as circular plotting, associative projection, and playful assemblage, the installation explores the intersection of magical realist literature and architectural drawing, weaving magical and real layers of the human experience within its spatial contexts. The installation is part of a PhD research project that investigates how intertextuality in architectural drawing can be developed to incorporate hidden or evasive accounts of everyday life into architectural visualisation.