Sara Abaw

My name is Sara Abaw, and I am an emerging architect who has completed the third year of the Bachelor of Architecture at Swinburne University. My architectural journey began in Iraq, where I earned a Bachelor of Architectural Engineering and graduated among the top three students in my cohort. Continuing my education in Australia has broadened my design perspective, allowing me to explore new approaches to culture, community, and the built environment. Throughout my academic journey, I have developed strong skills in Rhino, SketchUp, Revit, Enscape, Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop. These tools have shaped the way I communicate ideas-through detailed drawings, digital models, diagrams, and atmospheric visualisations. My design approach focuses on sustainability, cultural identity, and the emotional experience of space. I believe architecture is a powerful medium that can enhance quality of life, support community connections, and create meaningful environments that respond to both people and place. I am particularly drawn to projects that celebrate cultural diversity and address real social needs with creativity and sensitivity. As I move forward in my architectural journey, my goal is to contribute to the creation of inclusive, sustainable, and human-centred spaces that positively impact future generations.

(Untitled)Studio 5 - Museum X (People’s Museum) - Newport

This project responds to the emotions surrounding migration - a journey often met with fear and misunderstanding. Instead of focusing on difference, the design creates spaces that encourage connection, learning, and shared experience.

The site functions as an open social landscape, shaped by illuminated flowing paths, water channels, green walls, and distributed seating that invite people to pause and interact. Performances and gatherings around the amphitheatre strengthen the sense of community.

The spatial journey moves from celebration, to education, to reflection. Visitors begin in a marketplace that occupies two-thirds of the site, where indoor and outdoor areas merge seamlessly through large sliding openings. This unified marketplace leads into the museum, whose ground-floor exhibitions focus on Aboriginal heritage and early European settlement.

At the heart of the museum sits a central fountain with a glass-bottom base. Sunlight passes through the water above, casting moving reflections onto the ground floor. This gentle play of light and shadow symbolises the emotional currents of migration - uncertainty, resilience, and transformation.

The structural system uses arches as a universal architectural language. Repeated arches, vaults, and a central dome work together to create stability, rhythm, and continuity across the site. Vaulted forms enhance airflow and light while efficiently distributing loads, and the dome skylight is naturally supported through the outward forces of the arches.

Overall, the project transforms the narrative of migration into a meaningful spatial experience grounded in culture, memory, and belonging.

Studio 4 -The Wharf Tower Building (Waterfront Placemaking) – Docklands

This project reactivates the North Wharf precinct by strengthening the connection between people and the waterfront while celebrating the site’s rich maritime heritage. Through site visits and analysis, we identified opportunities to create a sustainable, community-focused development that enhances public life and respects the ecological conditions of the harbour. The proposal includes wet and dry entertainment zones, residential apartments, hospitality spaces, kayak stations, boat hire, and upgrades to the surrounding public realm.

A key aspect of the project is the preservation of the historic Wharf Tower. Although no longer in use, the tower holds significant heritage value as a former lookout for ships and maritime activity. Our building is intentionally positioned and designed to highlight and honour this heritage structure, helping draw people toward the area and increase awareness of its cultural importance.

The design process began with a Tension & Compression Machine, created as a form-finding tool. By experimenting with pushing and pulling forces, we produced multiple spatial and structural outcomes. From these forms, we selected one and shifted the main force point to the Site, enabling the massing to respond to key site considerations - sunlight, views, and orientation.

Through iterative drawings, zoning studies, and concept development, the project evolved into its final form. The four main zones - wet entertainment, dry entertainment, residential living, and hospitality - work together to activate the waterfront, attract visitors, and enrich the social and cultural life of the Docklands.

Studio 3 - Multipurpose Development (A Modular Wiki House Development) – Brunswick

This mixed-use project in Brunswick is shaped around a simple narrative: a family who works on the ground floor, lives on the first floor, and rents the second floor for additional income. The building is designed entirely using Wiki House blocks - an affordable, standardised, and digitally fabricated construction system that allows quick assembly, reduced material waste, and efficient customisation for small urban sites.

A key architectural feature of the design is the central courtyard, partially glazed above to bring controlled sunlight, natural ventilation, and passive heating into the building. This open core improves thermal performance while maintaining privacy, as all rooms are oriented inward toward the courtyard rather than the street. The courtyard also ensures cross-ventilation throughout the building, reducing energy use and enhancing indoor comfort.

The ground floor café activates the streetscape with an open, naturally lit interior that benefits from the courtyard’s airflow and daylight. The café strengthens community engagement and supports local street life.

Above, the first-floor family residence is designed around the same courtyard, creating bright, private living spaces with good acoustic separation from the street. The top-floor rental unit provides a compact, independent apartment accessed separately to ensure privacy for both tenants and residents.

This project demonstrates how modular construction and thoughtful environmental design can transform small sites into sustainable, flexible, and economically resilient urban homes.

Construction 3 (Sustainability) - Animate Environmental Components - Swinburne University campus

This project explores an open, multi-service outdoor room designed to provide a comfortable, energy-efficient sitting area on the Swinburne campus. The design integrates rotating photovoltaic (PV) panels with Glass X containing Phase Change Material (PCM) to create a self-sufficient and thermally regulated environment. The PV panels generate renewable energy while adjusting their orientation to maximize solar efficiency, powering both daytime and nighttime activities with integrated LED lighting.
The Glass X PCM system absorbs heat during the day and releases it at night, maintaining thermal comfort and reducing reliance on mechanical systems. This combination ensures energy efficiency, sustainability, and adaptability to varying environmental conditions. The room is conceived as a flexible and visually engaging outdoor space that can be applied to diverse settings while easily integrating with other sustainable technologies.
Functionally, the design supports a variety of campus activities, from informal seating to collaborative gatherings, while promoting sustainability education through its visible renewable-energy systems. The modular and adjustable nature of the PV panels allows for future optimization, including panel size, quantity, and shadow analysis, enhancing overall performance and solar efficiency.
Overall, the Multi-Purpose Outdoor Room demonstrates how renewable energy, passive climate control, and adaptable design can create functional, sustainable, and inspiring outdoor spaces that support both community use and environmental responsibility.

Community Centre - Interior Architecture Digital Documentation 1

For this project, I explored Rhino as part of my Architecture Digital Documentation unit. I designed a community center situated on a sloped site with a waterfront-facing facade, spanning three levels that include offices, multipurpose halls, and gathering areas. Throughout this unit, I developed technical drawings, sections, and 3D models, while also creating renders using Enscape. This project strengthened my skills in digital modelling, visualization, and architectural representation, providing hands-on experience with both 2D and 3D digital design workflows.

Acknowledgement of Country

The School of Design and Architecture respectfully acknowledges the Wurundjeri peoples of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners and knowledge-keepers of the lands, waters and sky that surround us, where we work, learn, create, communicate and make place. We recognise that sovereignty has never been ceded and this always was and will always be Wurundjeri Country. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who continue to make a better world through design.

We extend our acknowledgement to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, students, alumni, real-life clients, and knowledge keepers, who have contributed to our own education diversity and growth. We will continue to ensure that staff and students respectfully honour ancestral connection to Country and Place in everything that they do.

We are dedicated to the notion of design to make a better world and we acknowledge that making tools, shaping place, sharing stories, making meaning, wayfinding and collaborating have long been and continue to be both central and integral to First Peoples' cultures. We recognize that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ cultural contributions have continued relevance to design practice and commit to: reconciling ancestries of design and contemporary practice as well as pursuing culturally and professionally appropriate ways to engage with a diverse population of colleagues, industries and clients. In a time of treaty-making and voice we understand that there are overlaps between caring for Country and the sustainable production of goods, services, experiences, products and buildings.

Guided by the principles of respect, reconciliation, and reciprocity we undertake to indigenising and decolonising design practice by dismantling colonial structures and challenging biases that have marginalised Indigenous voices and design.

As students of SoDA you will be given opportunities to both engage with and educate yourself in Indigenous creative practices and cultural protocols through a lens of inclusivity, diversity, respect, mutual understanding, inter-cultural dialogue in all aspects of design practice. Indigenous people have been telling stories, making tools, and connecting to Country through visual media, placemaking and place marking for more than 60,000 years and these practices are part of an ongoing, evolving and live tradition.