Local leading surfacing brand Caesarstone has announced the winners of the Caesarstone Student Design Competition 2022.

The brief, conceptualised by award-winning architect Mokena Makeka was “From Ashes, We Rise”, pushing the boundaries of the entrants to think outside the box and get creative with their designs. The concept revolved around the rethinking and rebuilding of the home of South African Democracy, the National Assembly. “The National Assembly is where democracy can thrive and there’s an avenue for change to happen,” says Megan Noel, Head of Marketing at Caesarstone.

Through the brief, entrants were asked to be bold in their designs and re-imagine a new National Assembly in its entirety. Entries needed to reflect the traditions and symbolism of South Africa’s heritage – while showing off their unique design aesthetics and talents.

An impressive judging panel included names like Stefan Antoni of SAOTA, Dorothy van’t Riet of Dorothy van’t Riet Design & Décor Consultants, Juliet Kavishe of IID, Jonathan Anstey of Anstey Architects, and Michele Rhoda of ARRCC.

First Place & Best Presentation Award:

The first-place prize for the 2022 SDC was awarded to Wian van der Merwe. His lecturers are Jaco Landman and Nica Maree at BHC School of Design. Stefan Antoni of SAOTA had this to say about the winning entry: “Overall the graphic is just so clear, and so engaging that you’re drawn to it. You can feel the spaces and magic inside – that’s why it was such a clear winner.”

Second Place:

Anine Naudé’s outstanding entry boasted a powerful narrative implemented throughout the presentation. “The space was used really well, and we all thought that this is something that’s extremely buildable,” says Michele Rhoda of ARRCC. Her lecturer is Gené Keet at CAD4ALL Institute of Applied Architecture who helped her develop the presentation into a worthy second-place spot. 

Third Place:

Nielle Crafford’s magnificent entry was selected by the judges because it really summed up the ‘rise from ashes’ theme. “To take something quite disastrous that happened, but then to celebrate it in a beautiful way in the idea of the protea is wonderful,” says Jonathan Anstey of Anstey Architects. Her lecturers are the multi-talented Jaco Landman and Nica Maree from the BHC School of Design.

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Ever wondered who inspires our current generation of architects? For the lauded Cape Town architect and urbanist Mokena Makeka, experiencing the work of the late Modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in person struck a deep emotional chord.

As far as plum assignments go, Mokena Makeka has been blessed with the best. In his almost 20 years as owner and director of Makeka Design Lab, he has worked on both Cape Town International Convention Centres, the Cape Town railway station renovation and, most recently, the V&A

Waterfront’s Silo District. There have also been the less high- profile but equally important public works – like the Retreat Railway Police Station and the Thusong Service Centre in Khayelitsha – which have managed to imbue worth into spaces that had been previously disregarded.

“The Cape Town of today is very different to the one I remember from 1994,” says Mokena. “At one level, it was a beautiful city – and at another level, it was very ugly and divided.” The child of a diplomat, Mokena spent his childhood shuttling between Lesotho and the US. He remembers feeling dwarfed by the sheer scale of landmarks such as the old World Trade Center in New York and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. He also remembers being struck by the fact that, despite its mountainous beauty, there were few trees in Maseru, and his father telling him that it was because people needed firewood.

In 1995, Mokena enrolled for a bachelor’s degree in architectural studies at UCT, where he was taught by industry greats, including the late Paul Righini, Julian Cooke, Matthew Barrack, Anya van der Merwe Miszewski and Rafael Marks. “I’m definitely a product of my teachers,” says Mokena. “A moment that transformed my entire career was when I handed in a project during my first year, and one of my lecturers told me, ‘I know you can do better.’

After that, I never looked back.” Working as a young architect within the context of a newly democratic South Africa, Mokena drew a lot of inspiration from Constructivism. “We were a new country, so we were in the process of inventing who we were,” says Mokena. “I found it very similar to what happened following the fall of the tsars in the Russian empire, when Russians went on this incredible journey to reinvent themselves and construct a new society.

Architects like El Lissitzky were very thoughtful about the role of public architecture, because prior to that, architecture had been the preserve of the rich. If you think of South Africa, and how the majority of South Africans hadn’t had access to dignified public environments, it made sense for me to learn from the way in which the Russians were constructing their society.”

Stylistically, the work of German-born Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and American experimental architect and artist Lebbeus Woods speak to different facets of Mokena’s aesthetic sensibilities: Mies’s for its economy of design, and Woods’s for its surrealist emotionality. “Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion literally brought me to tears,” says Mokena. “It’s a series of floating planes, but he was also designing the space between the planes.

I think, sometimes, architects try too hard, just throwing a lot of stuff at the design – and that’s often because they are battling to design the space. So they design the object instead… I think true architects design space – and the object creates the space.”

Looking for more architectural inspiration? Discover what inspires André Eksteen and Braam de Villiers from Earthworld Architects.

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Alayne Reesberg, who is heading up the WDC2014, will kick off the workshops and highlight a few of the exciting projects coming up next year (read more about the WDC2014 programme here). Three workshop sessions facilitated by Mokena Makeka, Amira Osman and Luyanda Mpahlwa will follow, with keynote speakers presenting during these sessions.

Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi, who made international headlines with his floating school (watch the video below), will surely be a highlight. Alberto Kalach from Mexico, Nina Maritz from Namibia and Mick Pearce from Zimbabwe will further the global discussion. Not to forget our world-class locals including Y Tsai, Heinrich Wolff, Erky Wood and Henri Comrie.

During the two days of workshops, an exhibition showing the design and trade aspects of the architectural profession will be staged. Expect to see the work of merited members of the regional architectural institutes, as well as the academic work from selected schools, right alongside the finishes, utilities and decoration that go into the building process.

www.architectureza.org

Read our coverage of AZA2012 here.

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The World Design Capital 2014’s pop-up office was featured in our SPRINGLOADED VISI 68. The most recent addition is a Rock Girl bench designed by architect Mokena Makeka.

Rock Girl was founded by India Baird, a human rights lawyer who has taken the bench out of the courtroom and installed it in public spaces to create safe areas for women.

Named after the “strike a woman, strike a rock” slogan, India initiated the project three years ago after volunteering at the Red River School in Manenberg, Cape Town. “Girls were not participating in the after-school running programme because they did not feel safe on the sports field,” she explains.

“[We] began documenting the conditions around and at school, and created a plan to make their environment safer, starting with a safe place to sit at school when the older boys and gangsters harassed them.”

This simple intervention has inspired artists and designers such as Paul du Toit, Laurie van Heerden, Aram Lello and Tracy Lynch to get involved, resulting in some 17 benches installed in central Cape Town, each with a sister bench installed at a school in the township, over the past two years. Earlier this year, the first bench in Johannesburg was installed at the Sunlight Safe House, designed by Switch and sponsored by Investec. A sister bench is installed at De Waal Park in Cape Town.

Just after Rock Girl announced that they have been short-listed as an official World Design Capital 2014 project, the newest bench, designed by architect Mokena Makeka, was unveiled at the Prestwich Memorial alongside Cape Town’s fan-walk bridge — a temporary location before being moved to the pop-up World Design Capital 2014 offices in the East City precinct.

“I thought of a piece of furniture that was quite elegant and tough; might seem angular or austere from certain perspectives, but quite forgiving when you come into contact with it,” says Mokena.

The powder-dusted grey steel bench comprises faceted planes that make it seem both modernist and futuristic. It comes with a padded weatherproof jacket that is securely fastened with very strong magnets. Relying on corporate sponsors and goodwill for funding, the Rock Girl budget is tight and Mokena admits to having extended his stipend to up to R30 000 from his own pocket.

“There’s this discourse around making benches uncomfortable so that you don’t lie down on them because of prostitution, you don’t make them wide enough so that people don’t sit for too long. Instead I wanted a bench that was more like a chaise longue, rather than a bench that could only be sat on for five minutes. Three people can sit on it or one person can take a nap,” says the architect.

The cover is adorned with line art infographics that relate the city of Cape Town to its larger context in Africa and the world — the distance to Kilimanjaro, for instance. “Benches have a very specific location but I also wanted people to think about the broader city when they sit on the bench,” says Mokena.

Reworked from the original published in the Mail&Guardian.

See more of our extensive feature about the WDC2014 pop-up offices in the SPRINGLOADED VISI 68 available at selected stockists or get the digital edition right now. 

Read more of our articles about the World Design Capital 2014.

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Jam-packed with 10 days of events, Open Design Cape Town from 21 to 31 August 2013 aims to showcase the beautiful diversity of design and its vital impact on our lives. Here’s VISI’s selection of highlights.

Backed by a strong creative steering committee (read our interview with Tsai here) and themed “Design is for All”, Open Design pushes to demystify design by making it more accessible to the public, and showing its positive influence on society. There’s no better place to start than teaching our children. Hence Open Design’s strong educational focus; getting Cape Town school kids into the City Hall for an introduction into design as future career choice.

One of the highlights of the festival is that the Nelson Mandela Poster Project’s 95 works celebrating Madiba’s life and legacy will be exhibited in the City Hall (read our article here). Themed Iconic Design, this will be on throughout the 10 days of the festival.

Also happening at the City Hall and specially geared to young professionals during their lunch breaks is Talk100, which invites the audience to interact with speakers such as architects Mokena Makeka and Tsai, coffeenistas David Donde and Jose Vilandy, animators Shy The Sun and Triggerfish, and more.

On Wednesday 28 August at 1pm in the City Hall, VISI’s content director, Sumien Brink, will be partipating in the Lunchtime Design Session panel discussion – see you there!

Come night time, the City Hall will certainly not be sleeping. Besides the parties, one of the events to look forward to is the ever-popular PechaKucha evening. Here, as usual, people with clever ideas get to display 20 images for 20 seconds each and talk through their brilliant, world-changing ideas.

Meet the designers and the stuff they make, see furniture and light design in process, at the Western Cape’s Furniture Initiative’s In Context, one of two exhibitions showcasing the different realities of design. This one is happening at The Bank in the city centre and two musicians, Gary Morris and Marco Filby, were commissioned to put together a series of tracks with sounds they recorded while the designers were working. Sounds like welding, hitting metal, sanding wood, drills drilling, all form part of four tracks the two will perform live at the opening. Afterwards, it will be played in loop format throughout the exhibition period.

The other part, Insight, will be held at Selections Warehouse in Gardens and probes the minds of designers and how they process the constantly changing world of SA design.

There will be various studios open for visits and although these, as well as artist Chris Swift’s second solo show, Void, are happening away from the main venue, they are in close proximity and easily accessible.

Keen on it all but not keen on finding your way alone along the city streets? See.Love.Design is doing a couch tour, taking visitors to all the exhibitions around the city as well as to pop-up craft, art and design shops.

For a full programme on what’s on at Open Design Cape Town visit www.opendesignct.com.

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The list of 38 curators for the World Design Capital 2014 has been announced with widespread enthusiasm – there’s someone for everyone represented on the broad-ranging list. Other VISI friends include architects Ilze Wolff and Mokena Makeka, furniture designers Luke Pedersen and Gregor Jenkin, street art activist Ricky Lee Gordon and environmental designer Stephen Lamb. Heading up the dynamic group of curators is the experienced Paul Duncan, who is currently head of design for homeware at Woolworths.

It will be the job of the curators to sift through all the project proposals and decide which are worthy of the official World Design Capital 2014 stamp. With just a few days to go before the first deadline for project proposals – Friday 5 April 2013 – we asked Annemarie what she’d be looking for.

How do you feel about being selected as a World Design Capital 2014 curator?

Honoured and energised.

What does it mean and entail?

For me it is an opportunity to make the rest of the world aware of local talent.

What type of project proposals will appeal to you the most?

Projects that promote architecture – especially in terms of public spaces and tourism – and the talent of young designers and artists.

What sort of challenges do you foresee?

We need time and peace on our side.

What does “good design” mean to you?

Beauty that works.

How do you think the success of Cape Town as World Design Capital will be measured?

How? Mega successful by just being Cape Town! We just need to pray that the wind behaves and the strikes don’t spoil our show!

Will you accept bribes and in what form?

Never! Not even for an apartment in Paris or a job in Tokyo!

Enter your project for consideration before Friday 5 April 2013. More details on the World Design Capital 2014 website: www.wdccapetown2014.com

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