The LSAA Conference and Design Awards event has benefitted from our valued sponsors listed below. 

Download the Conference Program an A2 Conference Poster as well as an A4 Conference Flyer 
Information on How to get to Swinburne is HERE and a Map of the Campus with Locations of Parking Stations can be viewed HERE

‘Connecting to Tomorrow’

In the modern world of lightweight structures, we often find ourselves at the crossroads of architectural trends. Digital transformation offers us ground-breaking pathways to innovate on novel platforms in strange new ways, with the rise of AI asking us to rethink all we knew.  A climate-crisis-driven focus on sustainability has asked us to consider our impact on the world around us through smart materials and biophilic urbanism.  And new human-centric approaches to our fields have offered up frameworks spanning vast disciplinary bounds to tackle our world’s most pressing problems.

Today’s world must seize hold of all these new trends. Held on September 12 and 13 in Melbourne Australia, the LSAA 2024 Conference and Design Awards will spearhead the industry’s approach to all these vital challenges under the banner of ‘Connecting to Tomorrow’.

The theme seeks to encompass all the connections that will make up tomorrow’s lightweight structures fields – connections to technology, to environment and to each other. Featuring the world leaders in the field of lightweight structures, this conference stands at an inflection point, seizing the vast opportunity to deal with these crucial issues as we build tomorrow’s world, today.  

Download the Conference Program an A2 Conference Poster as well as an A4 Conference Flyer

Carols in the Domain has become a free pre-Christmas annual Concert which features many popular national and international performers and guests. The concept was started in 1983 by Robyn Anne Hobbs OAM. See more details in Wikipedia 

A Principal Sponsor has held naming rights for the event - currently (2024) being known as Woolworths Carols in the Domain.

The event is held in the Domain Gardens adjacent to the Sydney CBD, and each year the quite large stage and for many years the lightweight tensile structure covering canopy is erected.

The founding President of the then MSAA (now the LSAA) was largely responsible for developing the original PVC fabric canopy design concept.

Vinzenz Sedlak started with a lycra model at a scale of 1:100 and envisaged four masts located near each corner of the stage. Diagonal cross cables spanned between the opposite mast heads and a long front edge cable gave an uninterrupted view of the stage area.

Vision Australia's Carols by Candelight presented by AAMI is held on Christmas Eve at the iconic Sidney Myer Music Bowl venue in the Kings Domain in Melbourne!

Carols by Candlelight was the concept of Norman Banks MBE with the first event being held in 1938.

The current venue for Carols by Candlelight - since its completion in 1959 - is a pioneering, world class example of tensile architecture using stressed cables in a double curvature form to resist environmental loads (wind) and to act as an effective sound shell for music.

This is a unique tensile cablenet structure was designed by Barry Patten of the Architectural firm Yuncken Freeman Brothers, Griffiths and Simpson. Engineering was done by Irwin Johnstone. 

The venue is named after Sidney Myer, a Russian immigrant who arrived in Melbourne in 1899 and establish Myers. He also started an annual Music for the People with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 1929. He was an important philanthropist and wanted a more permanent home for these annual performances. The setting in the Botanical Gardens would be used for the "Bowl" which was opened in 1959 some 25 years after his death.

For the LSAA, the structure can be regarded as a huge leap forward in freeform tensile architecture. It remains perhaps the largest auditorium for concerts. It was at least a decade ahead of the cablenet structures of the better known Frei Otto who developed freeform cable structures for the 1967 Expo in Montreal and later the best known roof for the main stadium for the 1972 Munich Olympics. 

The shape of the surface is defined by the orthogonal grid of opposing pretensioned cables that form a double curvature, or "saddle shape".