20 April 2006
The Monash Faculty of Art and Design has swept the 2006 Interior Design Awards, winning three titles for its towering inflatable structure, the lounge-like Solivoid.
The faculty's interdisciplinary Spatial Research Group took out more titles that any other entrant in the awards that attract the best designers in Australia.
It won coveted Hospitality Interior Design Award, the Best of State award for commercial interior design and the most esteemed award out of all categories -- the Interior Design Excellence and Innovation prize.
The jurors said they were fascinated by the humourous, experimental and evocative Solivoid project and its methodology. It is "a truly innovative response to exhibition design that simultaneously compresses and expands space," they said.
Towering more than seven metres high, 10 metres long and seven metres wide, the Solivoid is valued at more than $113,000 and took 18 months for Monash design staff, postgraduate students and partners to create.
Exhibited to great acclaim at the DesignEX exhibition last year, and designed as a temporary coffee lounge for use at large trade expositions, it provides a space for visitors to wait, while incidentally generating multimedia patterns projected on to its surface.
Solivoid design director and Monash University Interior Architecture lecturer Darragh O'Brien said the Spatial Research Group had connected industry and academia.
"We have all come from practice backgrounds although we seek to engage with experimental ideas at a level that commercial practice often cannot." he said. "These awards suggest that industry acknowledges the need for this sort of activity."
Art and Design Foundation Dean John Redmond said the tremendous achievement was a great recognition of the professional standing of the faculty. "The awards give a strong endorsement to the interdisciplinary research projects encouraged by the faculty and demonstrate its capabilities in innovation and creativity," he said.
Mr O'Brien said the Solivoid could not have been completed without the support of industry partners, Inflatable Image Technologies, Sakimoto Furniture and BG Architecture.
For more information or images contact Mr Darragh O'Brien on +61 9903 2751 or Melissa Marino, Media Communications, on + 61 3 9905 2085 or 0437 121 978.
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