The University of Auckland is structured in a way that discourages cross-disciplinarity. Faculties teach and learn in isolation, with little communication between them. In 2023, degrees are now achievable with reduced in-person attendance, and student presence in these isolated faculties is diminishing. This further increases the distance between fellow students, making feedback and natural cross-pollination of ideas scarce. This new environment is especially detrimental to architecture students, who thrive on peer feedback and often draw from other fields to inform their thinking.
Fabricating Connections imagines this university, fragmented by absence and compartmentalisation, brought back together through the proposal, ‘The Table’. The Table is an express response to this environment and exists more as a utopian idealisation than a pragmatic project. It is meant as the point of departure from the current study environment at UoA towards a more collaborative, cross-disciplinary study approach. Through the figurative scaling up of a studio table, it is a framework built to facilitate the unrealised connections between students from different faculties at UoA, by incentivising presence through close proximity fabrication and in-person research, ultimately creating this missing cross-pollination. It is a structure built to facilitate the unpredictable work environment generated when three different faculties mix.
