Micro matters: why Harsha Rajashekar is embracing small-scale design
When UTS Architecture graduate Harsha Rajashekar was a kid, he spent a lot of time in hospitals, hovering on the sidelines while his grandparents received care.
He didn’t know it at the time, but everything he felt about the hospital environment would go on to inform his future career.
“Hospitals are pretty scary places. There’s beeping, there’s people yelling, there’s patients, there’s blood,” he says.
“I used to get very emotional and anxious.”
A graduate of both the Bachelor of Design in Architecture and Master of Architecture at UTS, Harsha is now an award-winning architect at Billard Leece Partnership (BLP) in Sydney where he specialises in the design of health care spaces, with a focus on the small-scale.
His achievements, including a significant contribution to the design of the new $600 million redevelopment of the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, have garnered substantial industry acclaim: this year, Harsha was named one of Australian Design Review’s 30UNDER30, in part for his commitment to ‘making the hospital experience, especially for children, less daunting and more inviting.’
Industry-led learning with an international edge
When he first started on the path towards an architecture career, Harsha didn’t really know where he was heading.
“I didn’t know what architecture really entailed, but because I was into both maths and English, I was interested to combine really rational technical processes with artistic design execution — something a little bit more flexible and subjective,” he says.
He found himself at UTS because he wanted to be “amongst the hustle and bustle of city life”, he says, and he was also drawn to the university’s extensive industry connections, which are an important part of every degree.
For Harsha, those connections took the form of guest lectures from industry leaders, as well as teaching appointments that brought real-world architecture professionals into the classroom.
Harsha on his international study elective to Oslo, Norway's Architecture Triennale and meeting renowned architects Atelier Bow Wow.
But it was UTS Architecture’s longstanding belief in the power of international student experiences — such as global studios, international study tours and overseas internships — that had a particularly lasting impact on his architecture career.
During his Master of Architecture, Harsha spent time in Japan as part of an international study tour. He was also the 2018 recipient of the UTS Jack Greenland Travelling Scholarship, which supported him to travel to Europe to investigate innovations in sustainable architecture.
“Historically, we’ve built buildings at the cost of the environment, so I wanted to explore whether there were buildings around the world that were purely made to rebuild the surrounding environment,” he says.
He drew on the learnings from his scholarship for a 2021 submission to an international design competition called Sleeping Pods on a Cliff, which was all about sustainable, small-scale architecture.
Harsha and his design partner, fellow UTS Architecture student Christofer Cattell, placed third.
Getting down to the details of health care design
As well as tapping into his newfound knowledge of sustainable architecture, the Sleeping Pods competition also brought to life Harsha’s growing fascination with micro-scale design, which is now a defining focus of his architectural career.
Sleeping Pods on a Cliff.
As a graduate with BLP, Harsha designed acute clinical environments, such as operating theatres and patient rooms.
“It’s all about the interactions that patients and clinicians have with their direct surroundings. To name a few: circulation clearances, medical services and storage are all critical,” he says.
“It’s all about the small scale.”
Now, Harsha has become so immersed in the two worlds of micro-design and designing for good health that he recently started experimenting with the industrial design of ergonomic products, despite having no formal training in this area.
He’s planning to launch his own company later this year.
“I’m still an architect day to day, but then on the side I’ve pivoted into the super micro-scale — I’ve gone smaller and smaller,” he says.
But if it sounds like he’s downsizing his design aspirations, the opposite is true. Just as he discovered as a kid in the hospital all those years ago, the devil — or in this case, the solution — is in the detail.
“The decisions I’m making at the tiny scale is influencing the size of the room, which influences the size of the building, which influences the master plan,” Harsha says.
“Designing at this small scale allows you to have a big impact.”