Mujassam Watan Urban Sculpture Challenge #8 – Tharwa Sea Front Site – Honorable mention Winner: Mihail Servini

We’d like to take the opportunity to introduce you to the Honorable mention winner of our Mujassam Watan Urban Sculpture Challenge #8 competition - Tharwa Sea Front Site – Mihail Servini from Australia!

Mihail Servini

Please tell us about your company (when it was founded, where it is based, how many employees, etc) Alternatively, if you do not have a company, please give us some insights on your own professional/academia background.

Servini Studio is an interior design and architectural practice based in Brisbane, Australia. The studio was formally established in 2023, although the partnership behind it goes back considerably further: Simona and Mihail Servini have worked together since 2015. Both partners are master's qualified, and Mihail additionally holds a master's in project management. He is a registered architect in North Macedonia and practices in Australia as an architectural designer. The studio is deliberately small. The two partners carry the work themselves and bring in specialist consultants and collaborators on a project by project basis. The current focus is high end interiors delivered to full architectural standards, with both partners active on projects in Australia and internationally.

Brief information about the projects that you/your company have been involved with. For instance, what scale have you focused on/preferred, any significant projects where the company/ individuals have been Involved?

Servini Studio is a boutique practice working on high end residential interiors, hospitality and retail interiors, photorealistic 3D visualization for architects and developers in Australia and abroad, and international competitions and architectural projects.

What does architecture mean to you and what is the role of an architect in your society?

For me architecture is one of the highest forms of art, because it is the only one that performs inside the everyday life of everyone. A painting is visited. A building is inhabited, walked past, lived in and remembered whether or not anyone chooses to engage with it. That gives the architect an opportunity no other artist has: to create spaces and symbols of the highest significance and to place them directly in the path of ordinary life. The role of the architect follows from that. We are answerable not only to the client who commissions the work but to everyone who will live alongside it afterwards. In practice this means arguing for quality where it would be easier to accept less, and treating even modest projects as though they carry public consequence, because they do.

Why do you participate in architecture competitions?

Competitions are an exceptional way to challenge yourself and to push the limits of your own creativity, free of the constraints that shape commissioned work. Equally valuable is what happens after the entry is submitted. Seeing how other entrants have read the same brief and the same site, and how differently they have chosen to answer it, teaches you more about your own thinking than any single project can. Every competition leaves you a better architect than it found you.

What advice would you give to individuals who struggle to decide whether it would be beneficial for them to participate in architecture competitions?

Enter. Competitions feed the passion that brought you to architecture in the first place, and they almost always uncover talents inside your own skill set that you would never have found without being properly challenged. The value is not in whether you win, it is in what the process forces out of you.