Sana Tabassum is commended, student, for a celebration of the mall’s shopping, eating and leisure activities in what seems a reaction to pandemic privations
Student: Commended
Sana Tabassum
University of Greenwich
Tabassum’s project, situated in her fictional food court ‘Metro Mela’, feels like a reaction to recent pandemic-induced societal privations. ‘Garden of Eat’n’ celebrates these spaces’ ‘extravagant nature and atmosphere, bringing back shopping, using objects and furniture as the basis for its architecture, creating an ornamental fabric devoted to all things shopping.’ In another image, even the closing of the mall, with shutters simultaneously drawn down around its exterior, is celebrated as cause for a ceremonial event.
For the judges, while Niall Hobhouse, trustee, Drawing Matter, was drawn to these two representations, it was ‘Playing Shop’ that most intrigued two of the judges, with Ana Luisa Soares, co-founder, Fala Atelier, feeling that scale plays going on in the mall’s hypothetical creche had a sophisticated intent: ‘It shifts from the image in the background to the ‘toy’ subject in the foreground - and so mixes things up a bit.’ Kester Rattenbury, professor of architecture and cities at the University of Westminster, agreed, adding that the work ‘showed a level of compositional and technical skill that’s well above average'.