Architecture says powerful things about a nation’s priorities.

In this series, Gateway to Africa looks at the green shoots of innovation in South Africa’s built environment. We see proof everywhere that South Africa’s thought leaders are powering into the future by brand new ideas with global applications.

1. Securing the future by learning from the past: Red Location Museum and the Apartheid Museum

Red Location Museum complex: Noero Wolff Architects

Port Elizabeth’s Red Location Museum is a monument to the system of Apartheid as it marked the New Brighton township, one of the country’s oldest, and the birthplace of Umkhonto weSizwe.

The museum is distinguished by an internal system of ‘memory boxes’ in which exhibits are arranged non-sequentially and without hierarchy. The museum ‘builds the future’ by making South Africans agents in constructing and honouring their own memories of apartheid, the better to map out new life paths.

There is no escape from history, but through it, old emnities can be overcome. The museum’s materiality – of rusting corrugated iron – mirrors the iron sheeting on shacks that gave the Red Location its name, and its factory forms recall the industrial unions which sustained protest against the Nationalist regime.

Apartheid Museum: Gapp Architects, Mashabane Rose Architects

The Apartheid Museum is rather incongruously sited next to Johannesburg’s Gold Reef City casino and theme park complex, whose owners paid for its construction. Yet the distant sound of rollercoasters fades quickly out of mind as the visitor approaches a whites-only and non-whites-only entrance, on the first step of a very high quality two-hour circuit through South Africa’s darkest days. The Museum puts South Africa at the forefront of the use of architecture to open up difficult dialogue in post-conflict societies.

2 and 3. New cultural landmarks in townships-turned-cities: Soweto Theatre, Walter Sisulu Square

The Soweto Theatre by Studio MAS Architects

Soweto, a city of well over 1 million people, did not appear on political maps for a long time. The Soweto Theatre is the latest major project designed to put this city, a key site of the struggle against Apartheid and a major urban complex in its own right, on the cultural and urban map. South Africa faces the decades-long task of making its townships, once dormitory suburbs to which ‘reserve labour’ was banished, into autonomous, mixed-use parts of its cities with their own infrastructure. This ‘builds the future’ by bypassing sprawl, cutting journey times, liberating underused land and enhancing the opportunities for entrepreneurship, employment and learning of the poorest South Africans. The Soweto Theatre draws on the rich outdoor theatrical and protest theatre tradition of the township. The new space is an opportunity to formalise and professionalise the deep well of talent that Soweto has nurtured for decades.

Walter Sisulu Square by Studio MAS Architects

Over 3000 people gathered in the dusty square in Kliptown in 1955 to adopt the Freedom Charter which is now the basis of South Africa’s constitution. Decades later, a vast monumental square has risen on the same space. The aim is to give an appropriate scale and a missing heart to Soweto, with an eye to the importance of public space to active citizenship and to critical democracy. Walter Sisulu Square houses retail, markets, a hotel, a conference centre, a transport interchange and performance spaces. It is an entire urban core that builds the future by creating a dialogue with poor South Africans in which the State, public space, and democracy itself is presented not as a distant abstract but as something tangible and close by that they, too, have a stake in.



4. Building a new paradigm for inclusive, immersive learning: Vele Secondary School and Lebone II College

Vele Secondary School by Activate Architects in association with Afritects

Lebone II College was conceived as a new paradigm in education: a school comprising productive farmland, accommodation and alternative teaching methods for the Royal Bafokeng nation. The school is yet another success for South Africa’s most ambitious and successful small royal tribe, who have converted the platinum riches of their ancestral lands into sustainably and transparently managed assets. The school design ‘builds the future’ by decentralising and de-institutionalising learning into a set of ‘village clusters’ that promote learner-centred education and discovery in small, informal groups. The school serves 800 learners in Phokeng, North West.



5. Using history and pre-history to tell a human story: Tumulus Building, Cradle of Humankind, Gauteng

The Tumulus Building, GAPP Architects and Mphethi Morojele Architects

The architecture of Maropeng, Gauteng’s Cradle of Humankind archaeological site, is a metaphor for discovery form within the earth. The Tumulus building therefore takes the form of the mounds constructed by ancient civilisations as burial grounds. These are among the earliest human structures, and they occur the world over; because of their covering of earth, new ones are being discovered all the time. The Tumulus Building ‘builds the future’ by staking a claim in Africa’s right to write its own history, as the increasing certainty that humanity originated on the ‘Dark Continent’ continues to challenge Eurocentric and Global North biases in the ways that knowledge is made and identities are constructed. 6. Giving built form to a democracy under construction: Constitutional Court, Johannesburg, Gauteng

Architects: Janina Masojada, Andrew Makin, Paul Wygers