University of the Witwatersrand’s Ian McBride is the winner of this year’s 33rd annual Corobrik Regional Architecture Award.
Musa Shangase, Corobrik commercial director, praised the up-and-coming young architects who were already designing iconic structures that would imprint their legacy on the country’s built environment. “It is truly an honour to witness history being made,” said Shangase.
McBride received R10 000, with Nonhlanhla Mashego and Philippe de Laroche being awarded second runners-up and received R7 000 each. A further R6 000 was awarded to Nicole Ramos for the innovative use of clay masonry in the building design.
McBride is one of eight young architects from top South African universities to receive this award in recognition of their design talent and
innovation throughout last year.
In addition to the cash prize, the regional competition winners are through to the finals of the National Architectural Student of the year Award – set to be announced in Johannesburg on 6 May next year – which comes with a whopping R70 000 in prize money.
McBride’s dissertation was entitled, The Queer Commons: Interweaving Queer Space into Hillbrow as an Urban Resource for Johannesburg’s LGBTIQ Community.
The Queer Commons is a speculative architectural intervention which proposes a site of civic engagement to offer assistance to the growing social and psychological needs of Johannesburg’s LGBTIQ community.
The building programme is configured to reconcile the fact that there is little infrastructure to compensate for the vastly different lived experience of people who are discriminated against and live in social isolation.
Lack of state endorsement has inhibited the ability to create a meaningful public interface for the LGBTIQ community in Johannesburg, therefore, this speculative development is conceived as an opportunity to engage with the city’s impetus to define new sites of civic engagement.
The proposed structure is placed in the multicultural inner-city suburb of Hillbrow, part of the Windybrow Centre. Transformation of the inner- city over the decades has had a profound effect on the social context of its LGBTIQ community which has in turn also exposed its internal divisions.
This proposal interweaves existing aspirations for the activation of the Windybrow site in Hillbrow with a new Queer Commons which negotiates between much needed structures of civic engagement in the area as well as an urban resource for Johannesburg’s LGBTIQ community.
Mashego proposed, Influx: Finding a taxi architecture in-between Tembisa and the inner-city of Johannesburg. This project is a taxi rank design project centred on Mashego’s commute between home and the city and tackles spatial inequality as well improving transport infrastructure.
The objective of the project, located in the Johannesburg CBD, is to use the socio-economic networks that occur on this journey as design parameters for a different typology of taxi ranks that transforms/enhances taxi ranks into/as social and sustainable spaces.
De Laroche’s thesis was entitled, Vertical Migration: Re-imagining a Sense of Place Within Johannesburg’s High-density Fashion District. In the thesis, De Laroche investigates the textile industry and proposes the design of a community textile and recreation hub.
The bold and transparent public building provides support and skills development to new and existing micro-enterprise tailors, and public space for surrounding inner-city residents to relax, study, and escape from the city.
In addition, a fabric sampling and innovation centre for an established textile company aims to bring larger formal business back into the fashion district. The building links into the existing built fabric via an abandoned light-industrial building, providing workshop space to micro-enterprise tailors.
The best use of clay award was presented to Ramos for her thesis entitled, Building a Xubi Nation, which is based on the concept of social connection. It looks at the social interconnectedness and strong sense of community in Phumula, a township situated in the south of Germiston.
Ramos said he designed a ‘self-build’ building that seeks to empower residents and encourage the existing ‘self-build architecture’ found in the area. Clay masonry was incorporated because it is a material that is readily available in Phumula and people are familiar with bricks.
The design allows people to use their own imagination and their own hands to create architecture unique to Phumula, giving the community a unique sense of identity.
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