Corobrik announces winner of Architectural Student of the Year award

Harold Johnson

Johnson collected his award at the awards ceremony that was held in Sandton, Johannesburg on Wednesday, 22 April. He took home a prize of R50,000 in addition to the R8,000 prize that he earned when he won the regional final last year.

His awarding winning thesis was entitled The 'Dark' City: Critical Interventions in Urban Despair. He said that he wanted to do a project in the inner-city as typical architectural projects were usually within/on an open or clear site and are therefore safer and less challenging.

"I was aware that inner-city development in Johannesburg was largely outsourced by the city to the private sector - so I wanted to know what happens when the city abandons its buildings and people." Johnson said he believed that his project demonstrated the ability of architects to re-frame and redefine any scenario/structure/environment.

Critique is global

"Although his thesis is very firmly rooted in South Africa - and in Johannesburg in particular - his critique can be said to be global," said Professor Lesley Lokko, who supervised Johnson's thesis. "The architectural profession is moving in so many different ways, encompassing so many different fields - from engineering to disaster relief, from project management to project coordination, from urban to intimate, from socially-responsible design to high finance and sustainable materials - that it is almost impossible to train an architect to do everything."

A commendation for excellence in architecture was awarded to Walter Raubenheimer from the University of Pretoria for his thesis, Redefining industry: Architecture as a constructive extraction.

Raubenheimer extended the sustainability of the project making use of waste material on the site for the manufacture of bricks that were incorporated into the architecture. For this consideration and the appropriate application of the bricks consistent with the design, he was awarded a R10,000 prize for the best use of brick.

Rewarding talent

Corobrik managing director, Dirk Meyer, said that the Corobrik Architectural Student of the Year Award was created to promote design excellence, to acknowledge and reward talent among graduating architectural students.

"The students from participating universities have certainly pushed the boundaries with their 2014 projects - some from a theoretical basis, others from a more practical perspective. Looking at the architectural design concepts presented, it is apparent that they have not only been influenced by personal perspective but by sound research and, of course, the teachings and the perspectives of their respective faculties of architecture," Meyer said.