Sculpting landscape: boulder and void on Buitenkant Street, Cape Town

Hall, Katherine

Sculpting landscape: boulder and void on Buitenkant Street, Cape Town

Master Thesis

2018

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment

Abstract

This dissertation proposes that architecture is the conscious sculpting of an existing landscape, providing a lens through which a dweller becomes aware of their surrounds. The outcome of this investigation is a design project on Buitenkant Street, Cape Town. It is a mixed use building: a place to make pots from clay, a place to distil fynbos to fragrant oils, a place to live and a place to submerge your body in water and swim. The dissertation is made up of four parts. The first investigates architecture as sculpting landscape as the solution to the uninhabitable landscapes that become most cities. Part One then looks at the reasons behind our yearning for a sculpted landscape and thereafter, design parameters are defined by researching methods on how we should be sculpting landscapes and how others have achieved this sculpting. Part Two is an introduction to the Platteklip River, Cape Town's original water source and the site upon which the theoretical ideas defined in Part One becomes a physical manifestation of sculpted landscape. It does this in the form of a narrative, collecting the metaphorical and the physical in a pooling of memories and artefacts, forming the clay from which the sculptor works. The third part identifies opportunity for intervention within the physical: a literal weir located at what is currently a parking lot, number 63a Buitenkant Street, where the program collected becomes a part of the city. Part Four presents the manifestation of the theoretical as the physical: a building as a sculpted landscape. The matter becomes the vessel shaped by the void within: a museum of narratives that forms a part of an existing landscape.

Keywords

Architecture

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