Old School/New School was an exhibition curated by Luit Bieringa, designed in collaboration with Mathijs Siljee for the College of Creative Arts at Massey University. It showcased design objects, artifacts, and stories tracing 125 years of New Zealand art and design history—from the School of Design founded by Arthur Riley in 1886 through to its present form as Massey’s College of Creative Arts.
Open for 39 days, the exhibition presented 330 objects and 22 audiovisual works from 270 contributors, filling the 650 m² Great Hall across four categories: Living, Industry, Entertainment and Identity. With no wall-fixing possible in the Hall, the exhibition structure was entirely freestanding—roughly 125 m of running wall space, plus 18 m² each of display cases and plinths, built from plywood for its availability, affordability, and workability on-site.To solve the Great Hall’s acoustic problems on a limited budget, video content was housed in 300 mm plywood cubes fitted with domestic DVD players and cardboard baffle cones—a solution echoing historical peepshows. Concealing the player while framing only the screen, each cube created an intimate, isolated viewing space, drawing visitors in close and dampening ambient noise across the exhibition.Environmental graphic design used a 45° angle throughout to contrast the structure’s horizontal and vertical planes and to accommodate bilingual content. Typography was set in Akzidenz Grotesk—a single 445 pt size for main wall and floor treatments (applied in white vinyl to raw plywood and polished linoleum), with labels and descriptions laser-printed at 11 pt to allow for late-arriving content.
Student proposals from the 400-level Spatial Typography paper helped scope the structural and typographic approach ahead of the design process.