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An Italian architect has won The University of Western Australia's inaugural Pavilion Project with her emergency shelter for remote areas and communities at times of disaster or distress.

Elisa Mansutti, from the northern Italian province of Udine, will be flown to Perth to see her design - one of 76 from 24 countries - being built during the Perth International Arts Festival in February 2011.  Ms Mansutti also wins a UWA Convocation Prize of US$10,000 and a mentorship with architectural film Cox Howlett and Bailey Woodland.

The competition asked graduate architects and early career designers to create an exciting and original structure.  It had to be a fusion of art and architecture and employ green technologies and principles to provide economical and environmentally friendly emergency shelter.

The independent judging panel - UWA Winthrop Professor Geoffrey London, Singapore-based architect Richard Hassell, Melbourne-based architects Sean Godsell and Peter Corrigan, and UWA graduate and Sydney-based architect Abbie Galvin - said it had been a demanding task to select a winner from the diverse range of submissions.

"There were many entries that were innovative, challenging, and architecturally poetic, said Jury Chair, Professor Geoffrey London of UWA's Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts.

"However, not all were capable of being mass produced and ‘deliverable' to developing countries for no more than US$12,000.  Ms Mansutti's proposal is a deceptively simple tent-like form capable of meeting the competition criteria and of being developed into an easily constructible signal of hope, a refuge of folded planes," he said.

"While it will meet the utilitarian needs of basic shelter, its schema allows the potential to expand into a grander and more ceremonial version."

Beyond the winning submission, two projects were highly commended: a team of Perth-based UWA graduate architects, including Ken Chun Kit Yeung, Jack Sze-Ho Choi, Tor Johnny Dahl and Vanessa Chiau Wei Chong was commended for its ‘plan blue' design; as was an innovative ‘dandelion shelter' design from Portland, Oregon-based Swedish architect Anders Gustafsson, a graduate of Lund University.

Media references

Professor Ted Snell (Director UWA Cultural Precinct)  (+61 4) 17 921 995
Janine MacDonald (UWA Public Affairs)  (+61 8)  6488 5563  /  (+61 4) 32 637 716