Architectural education initiative to focus on ‘A Piece of the City’

The Masterclass will concentrate on utilising concrete as medium of expression while addressing issues around the natural environment for design inspiration.

The Cement & Concrete Institute’s 2012 International Masterclass lectures for architects will be held in Cape Town on September 17 and 18.

C&CI architect, Daniel van der Merwe, says the Masterclass – the fourth to be presented by the Institute – forms part of an ongoing C&CI initiative in continued architectural education in South Africa. Some of the world’s leading architects have lectured at the C&CI Masterclasses in recent years.

This year’s Masterclass, ‘A Piece of the City: Atelier Bow-Wow’, forms part of the AZA2012 Biennial Festival, to be presented by the SA Institute of Architects in partnership with the Cape Town Institute for Architecture. The festival will follow on the first and hugely successful AZA2010 held in Newtown, Johannesburg, in September 2010.

AZA2010 was Africa’s first and largest premier urban culture festival and brought together leading practitioners in the built environment, and AZA2012 – with the theme, ‘Re-scripting Architecture’ - promises to achieve even greater heights, van der Merwe states.

He says ‘A Piece of  the City: Atelier Bow-Wow’ will be a two-day design Masterclass led by local mentors, Andrew Makin of Durban-based architectural firm OMM Design Workshop; Ora Joubert, the multiple award-winning architect and convener of a seminal reference book on architecture in democratic South Africa; Elena Rocchi, currently at UIC Architecture Faculty in Barcelona as Thesis and Master convener; and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto  and Momoyo Kajima, founders of the dynamic Tokyo-based architecture firm, Atelier Bow-Wow.

“A Piece of the City will be conducted in the historical quarters of Cape Town’s inner city through guided tours with a temporary residential design studio as a base. The class will revolve around the larger context of the city and sites chosen as the focus of a design intervention using concrete as a sustainable material of expression.

“The Masterclass will, as before, concentrate on utilising concrete as medium of expression while addressing issues around the natural environment for design inspiration,” van der Merwe stated.