Atmosphere 2011 - Mediated Cities

Andrea Mina graduated from Cape Town University with a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1980 and completed a Master of Design (Urban Design) at RMIT in 1994. He is an Associate Professor Interior Design and Director International Development in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University, Melbourne. He has recently completed a PhD by project titled ‘intimate immensity, an interior architecture’. In 2009 his creative scholarship submission to IDEC was awarded Best in Show at the IDEC national conference in St Louis and was subsequently published in the Journal of Interior Design.

In 1984 he established the architectural practice SMV Architects and continued to practice in Johannesburg until migrating to Perth, Western Australia in 1986. The family moved to Toronto where he worked for the architects Moriyama and Teshima from 1988 to 1989 after which they returned to Australia to settle permanently in Melbourne.

Since 1992 he has held a fulltime academic position in the Interior Design program at RMIT University and has played a key role in cementing the program’s national and regional reputation for design teaching excellence. From 1996 to 2001 he held the positions of Head of Department, Discipline Leader and Program Director. He has lectured in Australia, USA, India, South Africa, the UK and Singapore. Andrea has been intimately involved in the development of a postgraduate and research culture within the Interior Design discipline.

Andrea is a founding member of the Interior Design /Architecture Educators Association (IDEA) established in 1996 and executive editor of the first two IDEA publications in 1999 and 2001. IDEA presently attracts membership from all the Interior Design degree programs offered at universities in Australia and New Zealand. In 2005 Andrea and three other chief investigators were awarded a three year long Australian Research Council Discovery grant; ‘Spatial Knowledge and the Built Environment: The Design Implications of Making, Processing and Digitally Prototyping Architectural Models’. The outcomes were included in exhibitions at the Melbourne Museum in 2006, 2007 and 2008 and published in Homo Faber: Modelling Architecture, Homo Faber: Modelling Ideas and Homo Faber: Modelling, Identity and the Post Digital Archadia Press, Sydney, 2007, 2008 & 2009).