UNSW alumni win competition to build installation in Federation Square, Melbourne

BE alumnus Ehsan Khoshsima (Architecture) and COFA alumni Lauren Austin and Ben Elbourne (Design at COFA) have won a competition to build an installation for the Light in Winter festival in Federation Square, Melbourne. 

The festival is produced by Fed Square Pty Ltd in partnership with a range of organisations including sponsors, suppliers, community groups and professionals from the creative and design sectors. Under the Artistic Direction of Robyn Archer, it is one of Australia’s most beloved and successful artists. Now entering its 6th year and it has become a high-profile annual event in Melbourne, receiving national and international recognition.

This year the festival is centred around ‘light’ and brings together cutting edge artists, designers and communities from any backgrounds to explore and creatively realise ideas about light, enlightenment and hope. The program is set to feature an unprecedented level of collaboration with Melbourne’s creative, lighting and design sectors in a high-profile, socially-minded new initiative.

Activities, workshops, performances and displays will be anchored around a number of key installations and all will be infused with the theme of ‘the word’, which will facilitate a variety of public engagements throughout the month – art installations, performances, readings of iconic texts, community calligraphy and tattoo demonstrations, and much more.

Responding to a brief that called for the creation of a ‘Shed’ like structure to be installed in Federation Square  the group have designed a structure called “the Light Shed”. The Light Shed is a unique, illuminated shelter, designed as a subtle intervention on the Federation Square site. It is an urban intervention created to question the confines of public and private space. Designed to create a visual exchange between the interior and exterior space through the use of soft and sometimes invisible boundaries, the Shed challenges conventional seating and lighting environments by querying the lines between shelter, sculpture and architecture to create a space that is both intimate and exposed; playful yet passive. Private as much as it is public, the transparent structure frames the users as they sit, read and reflect; allowing them to be both the observers and the observed. Designed to utilise simple internal up lighting this notion of reuse is further iterated through the use of repurposed, low voltage Toyota car headlights to maximise both cost efficiency and assure a waterproof design solution for the shed.