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Education of an Architect: Learning from with in the City of Cape Town

Part 2 Dissertation 2019
Nicoletta Michalettos
University of Cambridge | UK
This research takes the form of a design of a new school of architecture for the city of Cape Town. This acts as a point of reflection on two broad questions: what is the figure of the architect to its urban centre, and what is the role of higher learning and places of higher learning to their urban centres?

Currently, the only academic school of architecture is situated on the isolated campus of the University of Cape Town. I propose a relocation to the city centre, as a kind of minor civic campus. This focuses the research to the new immediate presence of the public in daily learning practices, and the presence of the school itself to the city’s public.

Through ongoing design processes, these broader questions are pulled through a site in the city centre of Cape Town, the particularities of which allow novel takes on these global concerns.

In an attempt to avoid old delusions of the instrumental capabilities of architecture, the project aims less at forging connections between pedagogy and architecture. Rather, it focuses on mining and rearticulating important circumstances within the existing urban fabric, such as the quality of boundaries, urban borderlands and local transit, as deemed relevant.

Nicoletta Michalettos

Tutor(s)
Ingrid Schröder
Barbara Campbell-Lange
2019
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