Porous Edges

Space On The Edge Beyond Human Dominance

Thapelo Ntema

BArch Hons 2021

Supervisors:
Unit Leader: Claudia Morgado
Unit Tutor: Ruby Mungoshi
Unit Assistant: Azraa Gabru

UNIT 13^︎︎︎
Second Nature | Shared Futures

This project is an experimental investigation into the porous edge between humans/animals and human/nature within architectural and urban form, and how this linear boundary can become a space of sharing, negotiation, and creation. It takes the form of architectural analyses and speculations with the aim of finding new ways to “draw out” non-human perspectives. This drawing-out is seen as both a conceptual design driver and an opportunity to re-examine how, as architects, we represent landscape, architecture, and our broader ecological environment.  What do we prioritise in our view of the world, and how can these hierarchies be dismantled and reassembled through the act of drawing and making architecture?

The study is located in the city of Cape Town, along the linear belt between the “natural” space of Table Mountain and the urban space of the built city, as this space speaks to the existing heterotopia on an edge of human primacy. The work looks to the wildfires of early 2021 that burned through the mountainside and neighbouring University of Cape Town campus as a space of opportunity, culminating in a series of fictional re-buildings of the UCT Jagger library which was gutted by the fire. Three edges of the building, the roof, the frontal façade and the side colonnade elevation, are removed, replaced and reassembled in order to test the creation of porous edges.

Keywords:
Coexistence, Porous, Edge, Nature, Wildfire

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