Nina Nervegna and Felix Garner-Davis are current Master of Architecture students and recipients of the Bates Smart Award for their group thesis project. They reveal how daily runs and a multidisciplinary approach shape their practice.

How did your backgrounds lead you to study architecture?

Nina: I grew up around architects and always felt connected to the built environment. I liked the idea of rigorous engagement with a profession that incorporated art and pragmatism. Studying painting helped me appreciate abstraction, and service design introduced me to wayfinding. Architecture seemed like it held a lot of promise for new knowledge along those lines.

Felix: I grew up around architects. Prosecuting creative impulses under constraint is something I have always been interested in. It characterises many of my preferred kinds of poetry. I see a lot of overlap between literary technique and design.

How did you both meet and what led to this productive, multilayered partnership?

N: We met over Zoom during COVID in 2021. It was the first year of our course, and everyone was trying to get up to speed quickly. Felix and I picked up on our similarities by watching each other present ideas and designs. We soon started doing group projects together.

Aside from introducing you to each other, what has studying at the Faculty meant to you?

F: We think the studio culture is remarkably energetic. We have observed and experienced significant care and attentiveness from peers, tutors, and coordinators.

N: Felix and I are interested in holism, as well as design pedagogy, and we often talk about the “collective imagination” of studio culture.

F: This has been a rich, multivalent component. On one hand, you have the expansive promises of collectivity, which are superordinate to any individual. On the other hand, you have the constrictive implications of stylistic and ideological trends, which can individuate the collaborative field.

N: Negotiating this intersubjective condition seems to involve a special, ostensibly design-specific type of critical thinking. Again, we have found our tutors and coordinators to be skilful guides.

You won the Bates Smart Award for your thesis. Can you explain your work?

F: Our project began as a personal assessment of place, specifically the Yalukit Willam Nature Reserve in Elsternwick. It evolved into a study of post-industrial repair in and around Fishermans Bend, supervised by Alan Pert, Deb Adams, and Jonathan Mills, to whom we owe enduring gratitude for their support.

N: Overall, the project was an exercise in critical mapping, urban ecology, and multispecies design, largely oriented at managing water and generating an expanded civic field by establishing a new, green, aerial, flood-resistant datum. It sought to establish this new datum by attaching modular, immediately implementable prosthetics to existing structures, like power poles, roofs, eaves, downpipes, and bridges. These prosthetics were intended to conduct a range of ecosystemic functions, and were planted to attract pollinators like native bees, bats, birds, and butterflies.

How did you go about producing a collaborative thesis?

N: We developed ideas by running together along the bay each morning. We would establish the daily drawing, text, and research schedule, using our movement to prompt conceptual and formal thoughts. Outside of work hours, we dedicated all our free time to the project. We were lucky to experience an exciting, fluid process, partly through a lot of kindness and encouragement from others.

F: While we ran, there was something special about being close to each other and moving through different places at speed. We observed many plants, birds, soil conditions, waterbodies, and other environmental phenomena, all of which were important to our project. In the same run, we could pass through an industrial area, a public garden, and a quiet street. We were interested in synthesising our findings.

What does winning the award mean for your journey?

N: It has been validating for us. The recognition of our interdisciplinary training, interests, and approach has given us a lot of encouragement to pursue the mode of architecture we feel we prefer. This involves extensive existing-conditions assessment, consideration of landscape and ecosystems, investigation of activity at large and small scales, and speculative thinking. We love dreaming and practicality equally; being with ourselves, and being together, and being in the world.

You say that your goal is to split your time doing four things. What are they and where will they take you in the future?

N: We always talk about practising, teaching, writing, and artmaking. We want to contribute to local design culture as much as we can.

F: More specifically, those four things will hopefully involve conventional architecture, speculative architecture, critical and creative writing, and drawing, painting, mapping, and sound.