GSA_Unit 10

Unit 10’s underlying interest is in transformation. Through relating form and ideology, transformation, as a theme, serves a double role.

UNIT 10: Teatro del Mondo (past: Politics & Poetics)

Unit 10 is part of the University of Johannesburg's Graduate School of Architecture and offers a 2-year master's degree. On the one hand, it serves as a justification and generator of form. Since political ideology and architectural form are linked, and few would argue that political transformation is not necessary, we can argue that architectu

ral transformation is as necessary and that, in order to address, contest, and respond to South Africa’s political history, we also need address contest and respond to (or transform) its architecture. In this vein, the primary focus of Unit 10’ is the production of new typologies: new relationships between the forms and contents of architecture. This is where the second use of transformation comes in. In order to transform (or move across forms) we investigate reflexive relationships between building form, programme as content, political content, the site and personal agendas.

02/12/2017

The Unit 10 Bowling Club

31/10/2017

Digital Cemetery
Atusaye Msiska
Within its first eight years of existence, it was recorded that there were over thirty million profiles belonging to dead users on Facebook. This means that an estimated 428 users die per hour, translating to 10 274 per day, 312 500 per month and 3 750 000 per year. In the series of images, this information is represented as a tally graph with every line representing a life lost. With the growth of Facebook from one million active users in 2004 to over two billion in 2017, its percentage of dead users has also increased: with time the platforms we refer to as 'social platforms' will become 'platforms for the dead' or large online graveyards. A compilation of the known data has been used to forecast the future of social media platforms where the dead will eventually outnumber the living. Thus a form of burial for our digital beings is necessary for in the digital era we exist not only as physical beings but also as virtual personalities. In almost every digital interaction, a trace of our existence is captured in some form, be it on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat or other such platforms. When we die, these traces remain in the landscape of data. This work looks at a new form of burial: the burial of the digital being by means of a system and an architecture which would allow a person to curate their own information and how this would be presented beyond their lifetime.

23/10/2017

Eatopia
Gita Makan
As a cultural phenomenon, food has always been an indicator of social status, class and group membership through taboos, rituals and traditions. As such, the kitchen (and by extension, the dining room) represents an intersection of the private and public realms. Cultural diversity is heightened during rituals of food preparation and consumption. Historically, meals have often served as significant liminal spaces. They separate the day into conceptual chunks; they suspend work and leisure since they fall into neither category (or, for that matter, both). Eatopia is aimed at focusing the relationship of food and society through architecture, as food has the ability to connect people, cultures, identities and economies. The aim is to invite society to descend on Eatopia several times a day to purchase their food, prepare their meals and eat together.

16/10/2017

Last week's M1 crit at MOAD. Thank you to our critics
Zara Julius and Ahmed Al Kayyali.

10/10/2017

This is "Video Short: The Creative Co-Lab" by UJ GSA on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

09/10/2017

Altered States: Unconstitutional Court
Natache Iilonga
This project presents an inverted power structure for an invisible reality. Positioned directly above the courtroom of Johannesburg’s Constitutional Court, the Unconstitutional Court exists as a parallel experience, separated from and ignored by daily operations continuing below. Its programming accommodates the workings of the ‘Deep State’: this is the capacity of a society to engage in war when placed under existential threat. Upon the unleashing of martial law, the constitution is forgotten, action is guided by whatever will preserve a way of life. The Deep State can act in a space beyond legality and justice, for alternatively perceived objectives. In mobilising, the Deep State acts para-constitutionally, its mobilisation capacity is lodged in such a way that liberalism cannot explicate. Within this work as a built logic, subjects would make their way through what is in effect an elaborate and extended ‘doorway’ containing domestic spaces which locate the workings of unseen power within the daily experience of the inhabitants. The spaces culminate in a broadcasting room from which media provides the form of networks-consensus that can operate beyond societal and built constraints. On the exterior the project is a grand stair encased within an opaque glass box, its monumentality is only ever experienced upon exiting the programmes and returning to the seen world. It is at once an architecture of thresholds and a theatre of the domestic and political realms.

01/10/2017

The Fold
Manqoba Dlungwane
The project presents a critique of current land restitution practices which favour ‘convenient’ ownership transfer solutions by focusing on rural and agricultural land. I argue that the problem with this trend is that rural land has almost no capacity to enter the positive spiral of networked value creation in the same way the urban can. The project proposes a building for the Department of Land Reform which, as an institution, will investigate more radical forms for the transfer, production and distribution of land, adding to its functionality and inherent value. The theoretical basis of the project stems from Paul Virilio’s ‘Function of the Oblique’ and Russian avant-garde ideology. Spatial planning seeks to influence programmatic rituals through fragmenting and overlapping space, and is consequently generative of increased social interaction. Conceptual folding and unfolding of the programme is emphasised by a warping of the form and oblique surfaces, deconceptualising the boundaries between building and landscape. This relationship between building and ground presents an opportunity for public programme to be inserted in the landscape: the red pavilions are placed within reach of public spaces for which they cater, giving out information about the Department and a public usage of land.

27/09/2017

Urban Doorways
Euridice Paiva
Through this work a semi-fictional future is imagined in response to the African Union proposal that all major African cities be connected by high-speed train as part of its Agenda 2063. In a scenario of greater connectedness and accessibility across the Continent, where travel and transportation are made convenient and affordable, one could imagine many positive spin-offs, for example increased intra-African trade lending greater autonomy and stability to Africa’s regions. But this connectedness would equally raise an interesting question about the defining of borders in these new city-to-city relationships. One is reminded that borders are often not walled, as Trump would have them, but totally open: the decision is not whether to cross but rather whether one would wish to be ‘stateless’? The three images show three urban ‘doorways’ in the cities of Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Johannesburg. Within each of these circles, the continentally-connected community is contained, while beyond the limits of these circles are the cities and national identity. Materially this ‘edge’ presents an inhabited boundary containing programmes, which at times respond to the regional imperatives and at others interact with the greater city. These border walls or urban doorways are by no means impermeable; rather they reinterpret and make explicit the nature of crossing between the greater region and the specific locality.

24/09/2017

A Place for the City's Children
Adwoa Agyei
In the making of form for an orphanage and educational centre located in the grounds of the Methodist Church directly opposite Burgers Park in Pretoria, Wassily Kandinsky's ‘Parallel Diagonals’ is used as an abstract device not only because it allows for the physical placement of objects within an existing site but also, like most of Kandinsky's post-World War II works, because it explores the tensions between dynamic and static relations of elements and their effects on perception, without allocating higher importance to any one element. The principles behind the design combine abstraction in geometry with a more subtle response to place and the spirit of place, while the programme acts as a point of convergence for the city’s children. The work, which acts across the site and links to the park, aims to provide a location for nurturing and collaboration, while reducing the impact of the implicit barriers created by society.

19/09/2017

Arrival City
Steffen Fischer
Johannesburg since its early mining days has always represented an ‘arrival city’. In this design for a centre to house the administrative procedures associated with legal entry into South Africa, incomers arrive at the building by train, disembark at the platform from where three processes or trajectories are followed: that of the immigrant, the asylum seeker or the returning refugee. The cross-border movement of global citizens will only increase further due to political turmoil, pressure for resources and climate change, which will alter the Earth’s landscapes dramatically and render parts increasingly uninhabitable. A current vision of our world aspires to the creation of an environment in which there might be free movement of people, information and goods. This makes integration a primary global concern: the facilitation of absorption into local communities. This project demonstrates the potential for architectural representation to depict new relationships and operations of organisations, which would be both humane and efficient. The triptych, conceptual plan and section are linocut prints, or the inverted images of carved artefacts, representing arrival, processing and integration which is sensitively and systematically enabled by the architecture.

10/09/2017

The School of Life
Caveesh Sonatun
The School of Life resurrects the logic of the Renaissance syllabus, with its roots in the scholastic guilds and its focus on humanistic studies. Located within the heart of the City of Tshwane, the existing functional aspects of Church Square such as the National Treasury Office, the Reserve Council and the Palace of Justice are retained but invaded and therefore act in juxtaposition to the new inserted university programmes of science, philosophy, art and the performance arts. The theoretical premise behind such an action relates to a reinforcing of the importance of philosophy and the humanities in growing knowledge-based societies, and the importance of thought in a globalized world increasingly subject to the indifferent demands of financial and economic power. Architecturally this investigation into the revealing and concealing of biological and mechanical forms results in a determinedly curious composition which could be likened to a contemporary mannerism. While the programmes of learning are open to the public, the work is also imbued with secrecy: hidden chambers and a sunken grotto through which an individual must trace a path through the accumulation of wisdom and knowledge. In Eco’s terms, a functioning of a secret semiotic coded communication which embeds the quest for meaning within the path itself.

28/08/2017

Saddam Biwa
Along the Golden River
The work explores the idea of the ‘city as a wilderness’. It follows the establishment of several safe havens throughout the city of Danan, a fictional site that is a dystopian amalgamation of the cities of Pretoria and Johannesburg. The narrative tells of an astronaut who has crash-landed on Earth and must navigate his way into ‘the city’, now a barren wasteland left in the wake of political dissent. The setting up of these posts illustrates a new accumulative architecture which, when eventually unified, can be seen as an allegory for a space suit or mask that allows for survival in harsh environments. This selection of images depicts our hero’s travels along the golden river, or Apies, as well as his mapping of the journey, culminating in an outlining of possible interventions for the organisation of outposts.

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