UCT student wins landscape architecture award
Woodstock in Cape Town has become a beacon of hope in a South Africa where major cities have fallen victim to seemingly unstoppable inner city degeneration. Since 2003, when a business alliance and Cape Town's municipality joined forces to rejuvenate the area, an influx of artists and upwardly mobile citizens has propelled Woodstock upwards, transforming it into a trendy area populated by cafés and restaurants, boutique retailers and stylish inner city office space.
Tara McCaughey. Image: www.claybrick.org
This formed the context for an award winning project by University of Cape Town landscape architecture student, Tara McCaughey, who drew on her architectural background and love for nature, the outdoors and public space to put forward a living system that celebrates everyday activities through the creation of a network of public spaces that bring together a hierarchy of both public squares and streetscapes while providing an opportunity for nature's processes to occur.
Complex challenges
She collected Corobrik's award for the Most Innovative Final Year Landscape Architecture Project at the University of Cape Town, together with a R7 000 prize.
Corobrik's manager for the Western Cape, Christie van Niekerk, says that this award shows how South Africa's future landscape architects are rising to meet increasingly complex challenges. Whilst the environment and sustainability were important issues within a global context, there were also uniquely South African issues such as escalating urbanisation.
The starting point for McCaughey is Woodstock's position as the threshold between the Cape Town CBD and the surrounding suburbs. "Throughout Cape Town's development, Woodstock has always played this role, acting as the funnel that holds the potential to act as a gateway that filters and combines external elements into a rich, pulsating interaction of everyday performances."
Role as mediator
Every day the city plays out its spectacle somewhat unnoticed. "This everyday context is full of spontaneity, unpredictability, complexity and, most of all, opportunity. Landscape architecture can act as the mediator between nature and culture and has a profound role to play in allowing these systems to coincide on a daily basis, to create a platform that can begin to unify fragmented spaces within the urban fabric," McCaughey says.
"Public space becomes the agent for such a platform, where people begin to interact with open systems and one another, where public and private boundaries overlap and where nature is given a space to breathe. It is within this realm that landscape architecture can both enhance and celebrate the everyday, challenging conventional typologies of public space," she explains.
Fragmented public space
The main issues that she needed to address in her thesis were the fragmented nature of the current public space, the east-west linearity that divides the site into separate parts and the face that the existing site does not support the everyday activities of those living and passing through.
"This typology of public space becomes about the creation of habitable spaces within the dense urban fabric that cater for the needs of people and the environment, while establishing a network that connects facilities and re-stitches the urban experience," she explains in her thesis.
