Construction student takes on national built environment challenge

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Construction student takes on national built environment challenge

Construction student takes on national built environment challenge

Bachelor of Construction student Manjot Singh recently joined students from around New Zealand to compete in a national built environment design challenge.

Manjot attended ArchEngBuild 2026 in Christchurch at the end of June. It’s a three-day, 72-hour competition that brings together architecture, engineering, building science and construction management students to design a project under significant time pressure.

Manjot says this year's theme was all about pattern design: creating something that could be rebuilt and reproduced on different sites without much change to the design.

“Once the theme was out, we got put into our teams. I was lucky to end up working with Erica Lim on architecture and Bethany Cardozo on civil engineering, while I looked after the construction management side,” he says.

“From there we pretty much lived and breathed the project for the next two and a half days. It was long hours and a lot of hard work, but what really made it was the team.”

He says the team clicked quickly and had a lot of fun along the way, bouncing ideas off each other even when the pressure was on.

“The design we came up with was all about community. We wanted a space with a shared gathering area that actually feels like home, somewhere people can come together and be part of something.”

They built it around a repeatable pattern so the same design could be adapted and rebuilt across different sites without much change, which tied straight back to the theme.

They called their scheme Ōtākaro, after the Māori name for the Avon River in Christchurch, meaning “a place to play or gather”.

Ōtākaro was historically a gathering place for the community, used for fishing, food and events, which fit perfectly with their concept of people coming together and staying connected.

Manjot says something he’s really proud of is that theirs was the only team of three. Their fourth member wasn't able to take part because of an injury just before the competition.

“So the three of us took on the same workload as every team of four, and we more than held our own.”

They also got out for a couple of site visits, to One NZ Stadium (Te Kaha) and New Zealand's first net-zero-carbon home, which gave them some great inspiration for their own design.

“More than anything, the competition taught me how to actually work as a team: playing to each other's strengths, knowing when to speak up and disagree, and still coming out with something we were all proud of. We worked hard, had a lot of fun, and came away a much tighter team,” says Manjot.

He was also happy to connect with his friend Harsh Khurana from the Otago Polytechnic Dunedin campus at the competition.

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