Award-winning Drawing on Display

Fostering her creativity comes in all forms for Devyani Sethi, an architectural graduate in Chow:Hill’s Auckland studio. A ceramic artist, tutor of architecture and creativity technologies at AUT, and part-time painter, drawing is also a medium Devyani uses to explore creative concepts.

In 2020, in the midst of New Zealand’s COVID lockdown, Devyani was completing her thesis on Architectural Excavation in the Auckland suburb of Stonefields. Her drawing, titled Bhāvanā, was selected as the winning drawing for the A+W Tātuhi / Drawing Architecture: Sarah Treadwell Archive.

The Archive acknowledges and celebrates the ‘drawing culture’ inspired by Dr Sarah Treadwell, formerly of the University of Auckland, School of Architecture and Planning, and recognises the level of sophistication with the use of drawing in design process that Dr Treadwell championed.

“It was a real privilege to be the recipient of the 2020 award. I have been a long-time admirer of Dr Treadwell’s work and have been inspired by her critical approach to the use of drawing as a medium within our industry,” Devyani says.

Bhāvanā in Sanskrit means cultivating or calling into existence. A part of Devyani’s thesis titled, “The Earth Vessel – an Architectural Excavation”, the drawing is an interruption of the datum line and explores the sub-terranean. “The design is a direct nod to the relationship of the land and the earth mother,” explains Devyani. “Its context is located inside a quarry where violation of the landscape creates this fractured exposed sectional drawing of the Earth.”

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“It was a real privilege to be the recipient of the 2020 award. I have been along-time admirer of Dr Treadwell’s work and have been inspired by her critical approach to the use of drawing as a medium within our industry.

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“Forme, the importance of drawing in an ever-growing digitalized world is the translation of thought and the direct movement of the hands,” says Devyani. “I would say that my architectural practice and art both add value to one another as drawing provides me with the freedom to naturally exercise my thoughts and architecture makes me rationalise and examine it. I then reach a wonderful intersection between the practical and the absurd and that is where I believe there is true value in what we do as creative thinkers.”

Devyani’s winning drawing will be showcased alongside other pieces in the A+W Tātuhi / Drawing Architecture: Sarah Treadwell Archive sponsored by Metalcraft at the Refinery Artspace in Nelson from 29 August through to 24September.