'Rescripting Architecture' is this year's theme and is a considered response to challenging times and a world increasingly in flux, with rapidly changing global economies, environments, and political situations. The festival runs in conjunction with the annual Student Architect Festival, and also serves as the setting for the announcement of the awarded projects of the biennial SAIA Corobrik Awards of Merit and for Excellence. AZA 2012 also kicks off the official Creative Week Cape Town and is an important event leading up to World Design Capital 2014.
AZA 2012 speakers and presenters include UK-based, Tanzanian-born David Adjaye, whose practice was commissioned to design the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American Culture and History in Washington D.C; Rahul Mehrotra, an Indian architect and urban designer who is currently leading the Master Plan for the Taj Mahal and surroundings; Ora Joubert, the award-winning architect and convener of a seminal reference book on architecture in democratic South Africa; Andrew Makin of Durban-based architectural firm OMM Design Workshop; and Thorsten Deckler, co-founder of 26'10 Architects in Johannesburg, which has recently been chosen as the best emerging practise from South Africa in the 2012 biannual round-up of top emerging practises in the world.
A few additional events taking place around the festival, are the Des Baker Exhibition which features the work of architectural students from across South Africa, who have entered the Murray & Roberts Des Baker Student Architecture Design Competition. The competition required students to consider the relationship between architecture and film in the making of a public space. Students were challenged to locate, define and re-script a space through the combination of a set of logical processes and creative instincts.
The exhibition takes place on 14 and 15 September at the Old Mutual Banking Hall, 14 Darling Street, Cape Town.
Sustainable architecture design is the timely focus of The Annual C&CI Student Sustainable Design Awards Exhibition, sponsored by the Cement and Concrete Institute. This is the primary student competition questioning issues of sustainability in architecture, allowing for debate and awareness around design values and what constitutes proper design. It has also lead to an increase in the promotion of innovation using concrete technology as a way of creating more sustainable cities, communities and buildings in South Africa.
Entries for this competition can be viewed from 12-19 September at TRUTH Coffee, 36 Buitenkant Street, Cape Town.
An outside perspective has provided food for thought in the Changemaking Dealmaking Spacemaking exhibition, featuring the creative final results of a one-year interdisciplinary study on the Cape Flats by a group of Swedish post master students from Mejan Arc, the Architecture Department of the Royal College of Art in Stockholm.
The poster exhibition reveals how small shifts in ordinary action, called Seeds of Change, can bring about improvement in the local environment. Its emphasis is on the intersection of areas of education, food production, crime prevention and public initiatives, and the resulting proposed solutions are as diverse as improving local growing opportunities in the urban landscape to incorporating safe housing for learners on school grounds.
The venue for the poster exhibition is TRUTH Coffee, 36 Buitenkant Street in Cape Town and can be viewed from 12 - 19 September.
The moving District Six Photography Exhibition by Jansje Wissema features a portfolio of photographs that can be ranked among the foremost of Cape Town's most poignant documents. In 1970, when it became evident that the government was determined to eradicate District Six, the Cape Provincial Institute of Architects commissioned Wissema to record the buildings, street life and people of the area.
Demolitions had already begun so there was a widespread air of apprehension among the residents, but a considerable part of the District was still inhabited and Wissema vividly and perceptively captured what remained of the ethos of the place. Unfortunately she did not live to print the photographs in her own unique manner, but the negatives were kept and stored by the Cape Provincial Institute of Architects in the hope that they would one day be printed and exhibited, as they are today.
This exhibition will be held from 14 September to 31 October at the District Six Homecoming Centre, 25A Buitenkant Street, Cape Town.
For further information about the architecture festival, visit www.architectureza.org/aza2012.
