Manufacturing Imaginaries

The project presents an building that acts as a piece of urban infrastructure, facilitating the remaking of the accumulated archive of abandoned buildings in the Johannesburg inner city. It draws inspiration from current examples of ad hoc spatial appropriations that challenge the notions of permanent and purpose-made architecture.

The site forms part of an abandoned city block in Marshalltown, Johannesburg. The building inserts itself into the vacant site and one of the abandoned buildings, giving new life to a dying building. \r\nThe intervention acts as a machine in the process - remaking the decaying buildings in the inner city. Through processes of reclamation the proposal enables the upgrading of abandoned buildings. \r\nMuch like Johannesburg’s historical fixation on resource extraction – the project argues that we continue these processes of extraction but in a profoundly different capacity. By challenging normative building practices, construction waste and abandoned buildings are viewed as valuable resources ready for extraction. \r\nThis project explores the notion of a circular economy where the production of space is connected to the recycling of construction waste and the remaking of abandoned buildings. Excavated soil, recycled concrete aggregate, and reclaimed building parts are used in the manufacturing of new construction materials. The recycled materials feed back into the energy loop and provide materials for the rehabilitation of the neglected structures. \r\nThe education spaces, that start on the nineth floor, resemble the connection between acts of making and thinking - where the processes of remaking are intellectualised and interrogated. The building offers a spatial solution that prompts an intellectual discourse. \r\nThe section speaks to the ideas of material mobility – where large open spaces are serviced by a goods lift, open-air spaces allow for the organization of materials, and the programs that span the building vertically are connected by the movement of materials and products. \r\nThe project is intended to be viewed as a speculative vision for the future of the Johannesburg inner city – acknowledging that the architectural intervention is, to a certain degree, a speculative exercise which substitutes the perception of Johannesburg as a city is crisis with an optimistic vision for the future of the inner city.