Archinect - News

Snøhetta and collaborators unveil a monument for Archbishop Desmond Tutu

2018-03-08T20:25:00-05:00

Designed by Snøhetta in collaboration with Local Studio and Design Indaba, the Arch for Arch stands as a monument to the human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, affectionally known as “Arch” by fellow South Africans.

Desmond Tutu Memorial Arch by Snøhetta and collaborators, located in Cape Town, ZA. Image: David Southwood.

Marking the site where Tutu began many of his Anti-Apartheid protests in Cape Town, the Arch frames the public entrance to a landscaped promenade known as the Company’s Garden, home to many of the city's cultural institutions.

Desmond Tutu Memorial Arch by Snøhetta and collaborators, located in Cape Town, ZA. Image: Design Indaba.

The structure is formed from 14 strands of Siberian Larch wood, a highly durable and resistant material. The warmth of wood was intentionally selected to lend the Arch an intimate, tactile quality, that invites people to interact with the structure in a way that differs from the conventional materia...

South Africa’s new contemporary art museum opens in Cape Town’s former grain silo

2017-09-16T14:46:00-04:00

The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), the world's largest museum of contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, will open to the public on September 22. Zeitz MOCAA is located in a former grain silo at the V&A waterfront in Cape Town, South Africa.

Zeitz MOCAA Picture Iwan Baan

Atrium at Zeitz MOCAA. Picture Iwan Baan

Architects Mat Cash and Stepan Martinovsky are the project leaders from Heatherwick Studio. The new design transformed the existing building, creating a honeycomb shaped interior. The concrete tubes of the silo are topped with laminated glass, allowing natural sunlight to enter the building.

Atrium at Zeitz MOCAA. Picture Iwan Baan

Zeitz MOCAA is a new non-profit cultural institution with a mandate to collect, preserve, research and exhibit contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. Established in 2013, it is the first major institution dedicated to contemporary art in Africa.

Built in 1921, 57 meters tall, the silos processed hundreds of thou...

Unequal Scenes: drone images reveal Cape Town's "architecture of apartheid"

2016-06-03T18:54:00-04:00

In any city, space is a commodity. In South African cities space is historical and emotional. A new photo series by an American living in Cape Town captures the dramatic inequality of South Africa’s most beloved city. From an aerial view, Cape Town’s scenic beauty gives way to a stark reminder of the country’s past and the continued racial segregation. [...] “Looking straight down from a height of several hundred meters, incredible scenes of inequality emerge,” he writes on his website.

On his website, Unequal Scenes, the creator of the aerial imagery, Johnny Miller, writes:

"Discrepancies in how people live are sometimes hard to see from the ground. The beauty of being able to fly is to see things from a new perspective - to see things as they really are. Looking straight down from a height of several hundred meters, incredible scenes of inequality emerge. Some communities have been expressly designed with separation in mind, and some have grown more or less organically."

"During apartheid, segregation of urban spaces was instituted as policy. Roads, rivers, “buffer zones” of empty land, and other barriers were constructed and modified to keep people separate. 22 years after the end of apartheid, many of these barriers, and the inequalities they have engendered, still exist. Oftentimes, communities of extreme wealth and privilege will exist just meters from squalid conditions and shack dwellings."

"My desire with this project is to portray the most Unequal Scenes in ...

Curbing violence through better architecture

2015-04-01T13:50:00-04:00

Alastair Graham hopes Violence Prevention Through Urban Upgrading, an initiative of the government of Cape Town, South Africa, will end better. He calls the effort, which has been revamping areas around train stations since 2006, part of “a package of potential solutions … either improving safety, or improving socioeconomic situation, or improving quality of life.” The project is aimed at curbing violence by augmenting the public spaces in which violent crime frequently occurs [...].

Cape Town to House New Contemporary Art Museum

2014-07-25T13:14:00-04:00

On Cape Town's waterfront at the southern tip of Africa, the world's biggest museum of contemporary art from across the continent is being carved from a conglomeration of concrete tubes nine storeys high. The $50 million (36.7 million euro) project to transform the grim functionality of 42 disused colonial grain silos into an ultramodern tribute to African creativity is driven by an international team of art experts and architects.

The project – the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa – will be designed by British architect Thomas Heatherwick. "How do you turn 42 vertical concrete tubes into a place to experience contemporary culture?" the architect said. "We could either fight a building made of concrete tubes or enjoy it's tube-iness."

The museum will focus on works since 2000 and will be directed by Mark Coetzee.

Townships in South Africa: can design help solve the housing crisis?

2014-05-14T13:45:00-04:00

On the World Design Capital (WDC) website, Cape Town presents some remarkable shack design projects aimed to solve a nationwide slum problem. Yet even with more than 200 informal settlements and 600,000 residents waiting for formal housing, the Western Cape has been slow to implement the 'transformative design' it celebrates. [...] The backlog hit 2.1m units in 2013 and at least 1.9 million people (more than 10% of all households) live in shacks or other makeshift dwellings.

Apartheid ended 20 years ago, so why is Cape Town still 'a paradise for the few'?

2014-04-30T14:16:00-04:00

The South African city is World Design Capital 2014, yet residents of Khayelitsha township live in cramped, unhygienic conditions. The need for long-promised urban reform is urgent. [...] “Cape Town is a paradise for the minority, but I could hope for a city where everyone has access to the same opportunities that I have,” says Wolff. “Mandela may have postponed revolution – but for how much longer is the question.”