CPUT & District Six - Bridging the Gap

Mmari, Isaac

CPUT & District Six - Bridging the Gap

Master Thesis

2023

Abstract

Through focussing on and contrasting historical and contemporary District Six, this thesis aims to uncover relevant and innovative ways of integrating the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) to the District Six community by means of alterations and additions in order to bridge the gap between its past and its present. Within the context of the District Six Development Framework, this investigation seeks to uncover potential opportunities for both social and spatial integration of the educational institute to the district such that a mutually beneficial relationship is formed between the two. As a means of providing necessary historical context to the document, the first section focuses on the district's contentious history, the urban qualities and principles that allowed it to thrive, as well as its negative relationship with the more recently established CPUT. Next, the document focuses on storytelling as a form of human expression and, through unpacking theories on architectural semiotics and the use of architecture as a storytelling medium, I show how storytelling manifested itself into the built fabric of historical District Six. This, in combination with Richard Florida's theories on the "Creative Class", are used to illustrate the possible significance of storytelling in the future reintegration of the district Six community. The third section focuses on methods of architectural parasitism and alterations as a means of extracting lessons for transforming CPUT's inward-looking architecture into one that allows it to expand it into its surrounding context. Finally, the lessons extracted from precedents of parasitic architecture and architectural interventions, as well as those uncovered in the historical community's methods of storytelling, are combined in order to form the design principles used to further the proposals of the development framework and rewrite the story of CPUT's relationship with its community

Keywords

Architecture

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