As we approach 26 January, it’s inevitable that the architecture, design and creative communities are reflecting on the capacity and potential for the built world to bring people together in meaningful ways. Vigil: Gunyah, part of Sydney Festival 2025, is a site-specific temporary gathering space for talks, workshops and performances at Barangaroo Reserve. Designed by Cave Urban in collaboration with the local community and First Nations curator and artist Jacob Nash, Vigil: Gunyah is a beautiful expression of what it means to think, act and design with collaboration as a guiding philosophy.
Australian Design Review spoke with Cave Urban founder Nici Long, creative director Juan Pablo Pinto, and Jacob Nash, artist in residence for Sydney Festival, to take a deep dive into Cave Urban’s raison d’être and the special significance of this collaboration.
Cave Urban was founded in 2010 by Long, a trained architect, and Pinto, a trained architect and sculptor, as a multidisciplinary design studio that sits at the intersection of art and architecture. With a focus on research and innovation in lightweight structures, circularity, sustainability and creating community through engaged collaborative making, Long, Pinto and their team expand the defining parameters of architecture by pushing the boundaries of natural materials.
Cave Urban’s research and sustainability ethos can be traced back to Long’s days at university. “I had a beautiful professor at university who I remained close with after graduating,” Long recalls. “He wanted to do a PhD on the relevance of vernacular architecture and sustainable design to contemporary architecture, but sadly he got dementia. This was also a big interest of mine, so I thought I’d do it [the research] in-house. At around the same time I was introduced to Juan Pablo, who had just finished his Masters of Sustainable Design. We realised we had a shared passion for relating to natural materials and how they relate to the environment and the built world.”
From this beautifully organic genesis point, Long and Pinto have gone on to design and build permanent and temporary structures that span the gamut of architectural and art practice. From the SUKA Sunset Beach Club for the Royal Seminyak Hotel in Bali, which incorporates readily available bamboo and traditional Balinese design principles informed by their ongoing R&D into the applications of bamboo, to more ‘traditional’ — in a Western architecture sense — adaptive reuse projects such as Dural House in New South Wales, which embraced the original farmhouse’s materials, every project is authentically and intentionally site-responsive.
In Cave Urban’s hands, site responsiveness goes far beyond adapting a structure to the contours of a building site or the increasing unpredictability of Mother Nature’s moods. A central part of the studio’s research-through-art-making practice revolves around utilising resources and materials that come directly from the place itself.
And, when appropriate materials are not available, they turn to bamboo. “Bamboo is a great medium because of the scale of what you can do with it,” Pinto says. “The ease of building and the lightness and its relation to the human body is really interesting.”
This relationship to the human body is significant on multiple levels, not least for its role in community building. “We’re not just about bamboo,” chuckles Long. “But bamboo became a very good vehicle for creating community builds because anyone can be involved, even if they have a low level of skill. The structures we’re making are very repetitive — small tasks create something big — and the community has evolved because of the material as well.”
Vigil: Gunyah employs all of these principles and methods, honed over the past 14 years, to provide a platform for sharing knowledge and stories. This, as Nash asserts, is the power of public art and design — “We’re trying to spark interest, and we’re trying to make change within the community as well.”
For Nash, Cave Urban’s design and community ethos speak directly to his vision for the gathering space and event program at Sydney Festival 2025. Nash met Long and Pinto in 2023 at the Garma Festival, where Cave Urban was constructing an “absolutely beautiful structure with the young men and women in the community,” Nash recalls. “It was an ephemeral space that played with light and shadow and shade, and it also held the most important conversations that the community wanted to hold.”
This experience left a mark on Nash. When the time came to consider the program for Sydney Festival, he knew he wanted to create an urban version of this powerful experience that would be responsive and inviting for an audience and community who may not be as primed or open as those at Garma. Nash approached Cave Urban about creating a space for Barangaroo.
“I couldn’t quite believe it when Jake reached out and told us about his vision for Vigil: Gunyah,” Long says. “It’s pretty much my favourite structure in the whole world. Aboriginal architecture is so beautiful. It’s so of the land and of the place where you are. It’s intentionally ephemeral. It gives you shelter and it also gives you a relationship of spirit, land and environment.”
At eight metres tall, Vigil: Gunyah is an impressive yet sympathetic structure rising on the pristine headland. Constructed off-site over months by a group of Sydney architecture students and other Sydneysiders who responded to Cave Urban’s call to ‘come build with us’, the project brought people together to discover and learn well before its assembly and opening at Sydney Festival. Arguably, there is no more site-responsive, inclusive and authentic gesture towards education and understanding of First Nations principles and culture than this.
Vigil: Gunyah, which has been running for the past week, continues until 26 January. Find out more about the Sydney Festival and the Vigil: Gunyah program at sydneyfestival.org.au.
Lead image: Vigil: Gunyah, courtesy of Sydney Festival and Cave Urban.