Welcome to the tenth instalment of 'UQ by design', a 12-part Contact series celebrating the beauty and abundance of UQ's cultural assets. Join us each month as we take you on a virtual guided tour across UQ's three campuses, providing a brief overview of the pieces and where you can find them. This month, we look at some of those interesting pieces that are 'here today, gone tomorrow' – literally popping out of nowhere.

It shouldn’t be surprising that in an institution dedicated to learning, students like to (or have to!) show off their prowess. The School of Architecture is particularly renowned for this, with its annual design exhibition and other outdoor ‘experiments’. ARCH7072: Architectural Research: Materials and Making students recently made the lawn their classroom as they tested how digital design and traditional bamboo weaving could be combined to design and construct a free-form spatial ‘wormhole’.

Sometimes, the more unusual architectural forms you see around campus are part of one-off events, like in.bloom, which was installed for the UQ Bloom Festival in 2019 by PhD students Kristina Boychenko and Joshua Rivory. Using sound, light and motion, this fully interactive piece supported the festival’s theme of Celebrate. Innovate. Illuminate. with a sensory experience for all visitors that included music, immersive ambience, robotic components and responsive architecture.

And some ‘human’ architecture was on display during National Reconciliation Week in May 2018, when 55 people got together on the lawns outside the Forgan Smith building to spell out the word ‘Sorry’. Many of these people repeated the exercise the following year just before the official launch of UQ’s Reconciliation Action Plan to spell out ‘UQ RAP’.

The Great Court at St Lucia was the site of a unique chalk art created specifically for the 2018 Open Day by cartoonist, illustrator, sculptor and painter Dom Intelisano. Depicting the diver from UQ’s Own the unknown marketing campaign, let’s hope not too many people accidentally fell in to the water (although apparently, guide dogs refused to steer their owners over it)!

The Wep Harris oval at UQ St Lucia was once home to the James Birrell lookout, a sculpture created for the Turrbal-Jagera Art Project by Chinese-Australian artist Paul Bai (1968–) in 2006. The perspex and steel construction was Bai’s response to curator David Pestorius’s request to “make a work outside Union College that could reimagine the confluence between the internal courtyard garden and the surrounding green park environment – one of the original design concepts from the architect James Birrell.” Its aim was to remind people of Birrell’s views on landscape, space and architecture, and to enable viewers to be engaged in an abstract green spatial realm. It has since been removed after being vandalised.

And sometimes, if you look closely, you will see some magnificent RAP artwork popping up on people’s accessories around the place. Check out the amazing range of bags, books, cups, lanyards and other merchandise designed to acknowledge the University’s Reconciliation Action Plan designed by Quandamooka artists Casey Coolwell and Kyra Mancktelow. The complete artwork A guidance through time champions UQ values and the connections between Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous peoples. It features the Brisbane River; tools used to teach, gather, hunt and protect; the spirit guardian, Jarjum; a kangaroo and footprints; as well as a jacaranda tree, bora ring and stars.

Click on the photos below to reveal the full image