Grace McLean

On today’s episode of Show Us Your Portfolio, we are chatting with Vic 5th Year Grace McLean about her project ‘Titahi Village Centre’!

“The redesign of the Titahi Bay Village Centre ignited my passion for architecture that improves wellbeing through more efficient land and housing use.

The Titahi Bay Village Centre aims to increase connection and add life to the community. Aiming to make the village a more dominant landmark in the suburb, the design better connections residents to the landscape and orientates occupants to the sea.

Through the addition to co-housing units whilst retaining the existing program of the current village, the complex uses shared facilities and spaces to encourage social interaction.”

Thanks for joining us today, Grace! And what an amazing project! How did the redesign of the Titahi Bay Village Centre inspire you to pursue the more urban and social diagrams of architecture?

The scale of the site and the lack of community atmosphere seen in the current Titahi Bay Village encouraged a social project, which allowed me to explore collective design through both residential and commercial architecture. Exploring a large variety of collective programs all on the one site, grew my passion for how co-housing could provide solutions to both the mental health and housing crises in New Zealand.

From this project, the residential collective architecture stood out to me due to its personal relevance that I, as a young adult, will face in the New Zealand housing market.

Previously, has your undergraduate experience influenced your momentum into postgraduate studies, especially thesis?

I think the work ethic, habits of working, and exploration of drawing styles iterated throughout my years, definitely has helped me refine how I am approaching my thesis currently. Looking back now I can see trends in my work and environments I worked in that relate to my thesis interests.

Through the years, the projects I was most fond of were designs intended to help and connect people such as my 112 "Crisis" design, my 311 "Natatio" and my 411 "Acute Mental Health Retreat". At the moment my thesis asks ‘can suburban land and housing use, can occupant wellbeing be improved through collaborative infill models?’

What would you describe your design process as?

A lot of my process is driven around my extra-curricular activities and working commitments. I love working under time constraints and shorter blocks of intense effort. I tend to work most prominently digitally with a side notebook of scribbles, notes, and sketches to help work through problems points.

I have been working for Archaus Architects since 2018, who taught me Revit early in my university years. This has driven me to utilize revit throughout most of my work, alongside enscape, photoshop, sketchup and indesign. I think some people look at Revit as a more foundational rectilinear software but Revit's potential is really far more exciting when exploring its organic and parametric nature as well.

Where do you discover your inspiration? Any particular architects?

I don't have any particular favourite architects and tend to find my inspiration through archdaily, archipro and pinterest. Searching through various New Zealand firms websites or even walking around Wellington suburbs and actually looking, tends to get me excited about design ideas I could implement in my projects.

What aspects of architecture did you enjoy to pursue it as a career of it?

I think at some point in my career I want to design residential architecture that directly helps people and changes the way they live. Lately, I have been daydreaming of being an architectural developer of small scale suburban co-housing. I think property development has become such a profit driven pursuit...

I would love to normalize co-housing throughout our country by becoming a not-for profit developer using the "Nightingale" approach as seen in Australia. Through this I'd hope to make co-housing accessible for people who don't want to be involved in the whole design and consent process then can just buy into the collective lifestyle.

Lastly, Do you have any advice for your underclassmen among architecture school now?

You drive your education and only get out what you put into it .... watch tutorials, upskill in the holidays, experiment with new styles and push yourself, your time at university goes really fast. I found it helpful to do holidays projects (ie. redesign your flat) to practice new learnings. Try and learn a 3-D Cad software as early as possible in your university life, it saves so much time in the long run.

Make a portfolio or instagram for your assignments, it allows you to share ideas with you classmates and makes you take more care in your presentation. HAVE FUN, balancing activities outside of university will teach you to work efficiently and not let assignments consume you. Sometimes when you take breaks your greatest ideas come, so give you brain space away from your assignment to think.

Thank you, Grace for your wise words and for sharing your awesome project! Ka kite!