Fancy footwear

PHOTOS: Dook | PRODUCTION: Annemarie Meintjes | WORDS: Alma Viviers

How do you get interior design students to understand architectural design language? You make them walk in the architect’s shoes.

Interior design lecturers Ian Johnston and Roy Jones at the University of Johannesburg challenged their students with a brief entitled “A Step Into Architectural Design Language: choose and research the design language of an architect from the late 19th to 21st century, then interpret it in a shoe design in your foot size, modelled in cardboard.”

“First-year students work most effectively when they become the link between themselves and the design realm,” Ian explains. “By considering their own feet, the students literally and metaphorically step into the design thinking of the architect.”

VISI was most impressed with the students’ cardboard creations.

Katty Chavez Velasquez interpreted Spanish architect, Antonio Gaudí’s La Sagrada Família in Barcelona in elegant stilettos echoing the church’s spires. Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas got the cardboard treatment from Alicia Neveling, while Helene Nunes took on the hi-tech language of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’s Pompidou Centre in Paris. He Jingtang’s China Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo translated into a pair of red sandals by Wesley Easton.

• Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg: 011 559 1098, www.uj.ac.za