William du Toit Portfolio 2019-2014

William du Toit

The Machine Stops [exhibition]

The Stamper Battery

The Machine Stops [thesis]

Humbugaa Exhibition

Periscopes

Thin Housing

Te Papa Museum Redux

I am currently working as an architectural graduate at Anna-Marie Chin Architects in Arrowtown, New Zealand.

In my spare time I am a freelance graphic designer for event/music promoters across the country. The remainder of my time is spent climbing mountains or trying to snowboard down them.

I love all things architecture, specifically speculative drawing and its ability to explore new concepts and possibilites. My work often uses this as a tool to explore themes of conflict between the natural and man made worlds.

The following works are a selection of speculative and narrative architecture projects completed in the past 4 years. Please also refer to the separate construction sets showcasing my technical detailing and documentation skills.

Visible Cities

2023

Book

The celebrated Italian writer Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities explores the intersection of reality and imagination through 11 startling themes, from ‘Cities and Desire’ to ‘Trading Cities’ to ‘Cities and the Dead’. A hundred years after his birth, 11 emerging writers from Aotearoa have each taken a city from their own country and written a short story that pays tribute to Calvino’s work while addressing the themes that besiege cities in the twenty-first century.

My role was to illustrate the 11 chapters of the novel, translating Calvino’s original text into visual form. Beginning with quotes, the drawings capture a range of urban environments and their relationships in both the physical and meta-phyiscal worlds.

Publisher Cuba Press Wellington

Editors

Marco Sonzogni, Sydney Shep, Daniel K Brown

“At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passers-by meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city towards which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop...

—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities 1972

“Only this is known for sure: a given number of objects is shifted within a given space, at times submerged by a quantity of new objects, at times worn out and not replaced; the rule is to shuffle them each time, then try to assemble them. Perhaps Clarice has always been only a confusion of chipped gimcracks, ill-assorted, obsolete.”

—Cities and Names / Le città e il nome

“This belief is handed down in Beersheba: that, suspended in the heavens, there exists another Beersheba, where the city’s most elevated virtues and sentiments are poised, and that if the terrestrial Beersheba will take the celestial one as its model the two cities will become one.”

— Cities and the Sky / Le città e il cielo

The Machine Stops [exhibition]

2021-2022

Gallery Exhibition

The Machine Stops is a group show of allegorical architectural projects concerned with cultural identity, natural history and global ecologies. Thirteen postgraduate research students from Te Kura Waihanga Wellington School of Architecture reflect on how a speculative drawing practice can help reawaken environmental, societal and cultural narratives that represent the heritage of Aotearoa, even when these tales may only be visible as scattered fragments in the landscape.

The title of the exhibition is taken from E. M. Forster’s 1909 short story ‘The Machine Stops’. In Forster’s story, society relies on technology to provide for all its needs – and when the machine breaks down, civilisation collapses. Utilising Forster’s title and literary provocation, my work visualises the story to reawaken a tale about environmental devastation caused by hundreds of stamper batteries –now rusting in the wilderness – that were imported into Otago to crush stone during the 1860 gold rush.

“And behind all the uproar was silence the silence which is the voice of the earth and of the generations who have gone …. Only the whispers remained, and the little whimpering groans.”

—E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops”

The Stamper Battery

2021

Speculative + allegorical drawing

Undertaken post study and specifically for The Machine Stops Exhibition, this allegorical speculative drawing was an opportunity to showcase the all the techniques and methods I learnt during university.

This drawing combines 7 previous drawings form my thesis, intertwining them with orthographic, layering and notation techniques. From within the drawing an architectural intervention begins to emerge - a Department of Conservation campsite - while a field of architectural forms, sketches and scribbles gravitate around it.

The Stamper Battery aims to preserve important heritage stories of place identity during New Zealand’s 1860 gold rush era, exhibiting them as a dialectic conflict which is mirrored in the other drawings exhibited alongside it. This aims to re-present a seminal tale of environmental devastation as a lesson for future generations to learn from past mistakes.

Ink on paper Digital processing

3800x1200mm

Recognition

Featured page 6 of AD Radical Architectural Drawing 2022 edited by Neil Spiller

Feature drawing of The Machine Stops exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi

“But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.”

—E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops”

Completed specifically for The Machine Stops Exhibition, this drawing is the final in a series of 7

The Machine Stops

2020-2021

VUW

M Arch (Prof) Y2

Before the discovery of gold, the majority of the South Island of Aotearoa was relatively uninhabited, until the 1860s gold rush which quickly propelled the Otago region into economic prosperity. Once the gold dried up, the mining operations were quickly abandoned, with many of the workers losing their jobs as the industry declined. The historic goldfields in the Otago region now lie in various states of decay, with the industrial remnants and environmental scarring slowly being reclaimed by ecological processes.

These remnants represent both the story of extracting the gold that led to the region’s prosperity, as well as the story of irreversible environmental destruction that resulted. As such, each of the man-made and natural remnants represents a different point of view regarding this complex heritage event. This design-led research investigation proposes to use speculative architectural drawing to provide a voice to each of seven unique points of view.

Using E.M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops”, this thesis proposes to preserve

Supervisor Daniel K Brown

Thesis Submission

this heritage story though the lens of an allegorical architectural project. It explores how orthographic drawing, notation strategies, and layering techniques can be assimilated together in ways that help to reawaken and preserve a heritage story about New Zealand that is soon destined to be lost forever.

Recognition

Featured in “The Allegorical Architectural Project” article in AD Emerging Talents 2021

Featured in “Idea Building” article in Architecture NZ Jan/Feb 2021

Victoria University of Wellington nominated drawing for the Tātuhi / Drawing Architecture: Sarah Treadwell Archive

Final experiment of the thesis testing how speculative drawings can be used as generators for a practical architectural intervention

Lamentations Series I 2021

Pen and ink on paper + digital excavation

Humbugaa Pop-up Exhibition

Hosted by Humbugaa

The Flash Exhibition was mounted on 19 February 2021 at Whistling Sisters Brewery as a 1 hour pop-up. The exhibition tested how well the speculative drawings were able to convey the individual stories of the gold mining remnants of site, while also enabling the viewers to critically reflect on the overall dialectic narrative of the Homeward Bound Site.

It was a great exercise in curating and displaying the work, as well as explaining it to a variety of people from a mostly architectural background. These discussions were extremely helpful in my understanding of how people experienced the drawings, what they saw in them, as well as what they did not fully understand.

The Mineshaft drawing suspended under the lights— testing curating and display for the exhibition

Testing how a series of curated drawings can preserve heritage stories that are destined to be lost

Periscopes

2022

Brick Bay Folly

Architecture Competition

The core concept at the heart of this proposal is reconnecting and engaging with the natural environment. In today’s everconnected society, we are constantly reminded of how humanity is irreversibly polluting our environment, yet we are so slow to change our ways. This proposal intends to activate the architectural folly as an instrument, ‘resetting’ our perception and ‘re-engaging’ with the surrounding landscape.

This project proposes three periscope structures to highlight the three pillars of the natural world—sea, land, and sky—by creating points of pause along a journey of reflection. Each point of pause features a framed view through an architectural instrument that simultaneously isolates one in space and frames their view. After completing their journey through the intervention, visitors are able to piece together their own unique perception of the surrounding landscape. The three framed views act as catalytic fragments, inviting the visitor’s personal memories and experiences to fill the gaps between—forming a new, intimate perception of the natural environment as a whole.

Brick Bay Sculpture Trust Snells Beach, Auckland

Collaboration with Clark Murray

Recognition

Shortlisted Top 5 Finalist

Feature in “Finalists Announced:

Brick Bay Folly 2022” article in Architecture NZ Sept/Oct 2022

physical model testing of the periscope mechanism

Thin Housing

M Arch (Prof) Y1

Thin housing proposes a new typology of student co-housing, targeting a demographic who can be seen as modern day nomadsconstantly moving between cold, damp and expensive flats.

A parasitic intervention is proposed ontop of an existing university hall, keeping students close proximity to support services. An integrated crane allows the building to grow or shrink as yearly demand fluctuates - keeping students within the city centre and revitalising the youthful nature

ARCI411 Co-Housing stream

Tutor

Michael Melville foster+melville architects

“...a highly mobile person requires interchangeable homes which offer a ‘light’ consistency. In this sense their home is spread ‘thin’, where they view the road itself their favourite place.”

—J.W Duyvendak, “The Politics of Home”

06:40:36:09

Te Papa Museum Redux

2019 VUW

M Arch (Prof) Y1

ARCI412

Architectural Drawing Stream

Tasked to critique and redesign the Aotearoa’s national museum Te Papa Tongarewa, this speculative design proposes a new typology for Wellington’s waterfront site.

Situated and sunk into the Wellington fault line running directly through the site, the museum is treated as a giant seismic jointallowing the two tectonic plates to move independently while protecting the nation’s taonga.

Based in the architectural drawing stream, this project was required to engage with traditional analog methods of architectural representation.

Tutor

Peter Wood

Recognition

Essay awarded Highly Commended in the 2019 Warren Trust Writing Awards

Essay published in “10 Stories: Writing About Architecture” 2019 by New Zealand Institute of Architects

Located on the Wellington fault line, the design proposes a new museum suspended in both space and time

Testing how pieces of drawing can tell a story over different passages of time— enabling a variety of stories to emerge from the same fragment.

Thanks for taking the time to view my architecture portfolio!

The works shown are primarily speculative projects, based on architectural theory and focused on architectural drawing.

If you wish to see other projects, such as practice based architecture or graphic design please contact me direct.

Cheers,