Celeste Raanoja Awarded Byera Hadley Travel Scholarship

It is with great pleasure that we want to congratulate Celeste Raanoja for being awarded the Byera Hadley Travelling Scholarship for 2019. Her hard work “Physical Value: A Proposal for Reinstating the Cultural Value of the Architectural Model” was shortlisted from a series of proposals from recent graduates to be awarded state funding for a travel scholarship.

While Celeste is still refining the specific themes and locations she will explore, her research will see her travel to architecture firms in Europe to explore how different cultures utilise, curate and value the architectural model in their design process and architectural historical records. Photography will be a key component of the work that will be undertaken throughout the research.

We greatly look forward to seeing how the work evolves, and the outcomes of her research over the coming year which we will share on the Make Models blog. In the meantime, please have a read of the abstract to her proposal for a sneak peek of what to expect:

“The architect and the architectural model have historically gone hand in hand. Even in today’s digital age the general public, architecture firms and architectural institutions hold the firm belief that it is still a fundamental design tool, with which architects engage. Architecture schools, practices, councils, developers and competition organisers all still regularly utilise the practice of model-making as a critical tool in explaining an architectural idea or concept. Yet, it’s use in Australian architectural culture is dwindling in an age of digital design tools, and it’s prominence within Australian architectural culture is more subdued than that of our international peers. One need only peruse the bookshelves of contemporary Japanese and contemporary European architectural publications, to note that models are still a fundamental part of many architectural firm’s design processes around the globe. Culturally too, foreign galleries and foregin museums regularly collect and archive the works of architectural practices as art pieces, snapshots of design narratives , to be preserved and displayed towards the public’s appreciation of architecture as an artform. This proposal aims to answer the broader question; How can we be thinking differently about the worth and value of Architectural models to our culture of design in Australia? This inquiry will adopt a cultural and practical lens with which to view the topic. The cultural lense will aim to understand the perceived value of model making to people external to the industry by asking; How is the physical model valued as an Architectural Archive? The practical lense will inquire as to how we currently use models within our global industry; by asking ‘what is the significance of the physical model to the Architectural Process?’