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A project that highlights imagination and intelligent design - a unique, creative ability to combine the two to create a project that nevertheless treads lightly on our earth. This is how Corobrik's managing director, Dirk Meyer, described the project entitled "Magazine Hill: A weathered continuum" that came up tops in the 2012 Corobrik Architectural Student of the Year Awards.
"These awards were created 25 years ago to promote excellence in design and to acknowledge emerging talent among architectural students. Today, the challenges facing architects and ultimately the students who will be the future crafters of our cities' built environments is increasingly complex, demanding a competence in art, tectonics, science, building regulations, socio-economics and finance, in order to come up with design solutions that fit the budget, massage or engage the visual senses, inspire and address the social and environmental issues of the day," Meyer said.
Explosion scarred Magazine Hill
This year's winner, Clifford Gouws from the University of Pretoria, through his project concentrates on an abandoned historical military site on Magazine Hill in Pretoria. The site consists of two underground ammunition magazines, five bomb shelters and ammunition factories - all structures representing an era of unrest in South Africa. In 1945, a mysterious explosion of the central magazine scarred the face of Magazine Hill, leading the activities on the site to an early death, trapping architecture in time and abandonment.
The project places contemporary commemorative architecture under the limelight, criticizing the static notion of heritage commemoration through the typologies of museums and memorials. The architectural response focuses on commemoration through everyday use. A brass foundry is proposed to recycle the spent ammunition shells of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), thereby introducing brass artists as a public interface. Where ammunition was once produced, ammunition will now be reduced, exposing different layers of the past by reinstating a connection between architecture and time.
Gouws took home a prize of R50 000 from Corobrik to add to his regional winnings of R6 000. The judging panel comprised president of the KwaZulu-Natal Institute for Architecture, Nina Saunders, senior researcher of sustainable human settlements at the Built-Environment Unit of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research at the University of Pretoria, Dr Amira Osman and award winning architect Jeremy Rose of Mashabane Rose Architects.
