shivani gopi

I am a Graduate Architect and Urban Designer with experience working on international projects across diverse urban contexts. As a finalist in the Boroondara Urban Design Awards, I am driven by a commitment to creating architecture that delivers meaningful social and economic impact.

My design approach is rooted in manual sketching, sectional storytelling, and human-centred spatial exploration. I believe that architecture begins with understanding lived experience, and I use drawing as a way to translate everyday behaviours, emotions, and movement patterns into built form.

Across my work, I focus on how design can strengthen community wellbeing and urban resilience — from revitalising neglected spaces to shaping active, connected environments. I aim to create projects that not only solve spatial problems but also contribute positively to the cultural and social fabric of their surroundings.

Waterscape living

Waterscape Living explores water as a transformative architectural medium — one that shapes health, wellbeing, and social connection within dense urban environments. In an Australian context, water holds cultural, ecological, and experiential significance, and this project brings those qualities into the heart of a commercial precinct.

The design integrates therapeutic water programs, leisure landscapes, and professional wellness facilities directly into a housing development, creating a vertical ecosystem of baths, recovery spaces, sensory pods, spas, and swimming environments. By embedding these experiences beneath and between residential clusters, the project turns water into a shared social infrastructure rather than a private luxury.

Through sectional exploration and layered spatial narratives, Waterscape Living demonstrates how water can heighten awareness, encourage restorative rituals, and add meaningful urban value. The result is a housing model where everyday living is enhanced through immersion, movement, and sensory engagement — a place where architecture and water work together to nurture community wellbeing

Multi-Generational building

This multigenerational housing proposal employs a split-level program to strategically organise living zones, ensuring both privacy and intergenerational connection within a compact urban footprint. The staggered floor configuration separates the primary suites vertically, creating clear acoustic and visual buffers for elderly residents while maintaining proximity to family support.

Units are designed with shared balconies positioned as semi-public thresholds between private rooms and communal spaces. These balconies operate as transitional social platforms, encouraging incidental interactions while preserving personal boundaries. Cross-ventilation and daylight penetration are enhanced through the building’s modular arrangement, which stacks and shifts units to maximise airflow across shared and individual spaces.

Visual connectivity is intentionally choreographed through internal openings, layered sightlines, and shared circulation paths that allow families to maintain awareness of one another without compromising autonomy. The combination of split-level organisation, modular unit development, and shared outdoor edges results in a highly adaptable multigenerational model that supports ageing-in-place, promotes social cohesion, and meets diverse spatial needs across generations.

Housing for creative industry

This thesis proposes the adaptive reuse of an existing warehouse into a hybrid creative production hub and housing model designed to support emerging creators. The project repositions the warehouse as a publicly accessible resource centre where artists, designers, and makers can produce work, share tools, collaborate, and exhibit within the same architectural ecosystem.

At the core of the design is a multi-level central void staircase, a vertical public spine that physically and visually connects the creative workspace below with the residences above. This shared atrium encourages transparency between living and making, allowing residents to stay immersed in the creative energy of the hub while maintaining spatial separation for privacy and focused work.

The warehouse floor is restructured into flexible production landscapes—open studios, display niches, and communal platforms—defined by warm brick partitions and sculptural circulation paths. These layers create a porous interior where movement, making, and exhibition coexist. Above, housing units overlook the creative void, reinforcing a sense of community and constant artistic dialogue.

By merging public creative infrastructure with residential living, the project introduces a new urban typology that supports the creative economy, activates underutilised industrial fabric, and fosters a living-working environment where ideas can be produced, shared, and celebrated.

Footscray cycling plaza

My solution fulfils the project brief by transforming a neglected, obstructed laneway network into a continuous, safe and elevated cycling plaza that eliminates conflicts with traffic.
I addressed this by developing a “bypass surgery”–inspired design strategy, where instead of forcing the bike route through existing blockages, the lane is elevated and woven above ground-level obstacles — just as a bypass redirects blood flow around a blockage.
The proposal converts dead lanes and unused pockets into active public plazas. These previously unsafe or inactive areas gain surveillance, foot traffic, and programmed uses — fulfilling the objective of improving urban vitality.

Footscray cycling plaza _Section

The bike lane structure is supported by sculptural “mesh-stent” columns inspired by medical stents, symbolising circulation and flow. This not only solves structural needs but strengthens the conceptual narrative and contributes to the identity of the precinct.