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A Sustainable Small Scale Farming Community

Part 2 Project 2004
Melchior Stander
Roven Rebeira
Tshwane University of Technology Pretoria | South Africa
In the reforming of our Country under the new dispensation, the dilemma of redistribution of land ownership concerning farming forms an impotant debate. Thougtless reform could lead down the quick road to ruin:- a Zimbabwean paradigm where the new owners are placed in a farming situation foreign to their indigenous culture, with disasterous results.

This is a search for a sustainable contemporary African village, envisaged as interruption of the landscape, acknowledging the vastness of the South African landscape in an attempt to demarcate some of this space to offer shelter and refuge in an appropriate architectural language.

Melchior Stander
Roven Rebeira


A well researched project that attempts to solve, with eloquent simplicity, a problem that has been in the front of many South African architects’ minds for many years.
What constitutes an approriate indiginous architectural language in a multi-cultural society?
The prevalent superficial surface skimming culminating in rondavel shaped buildings or Ndebele patterns, superimposed on a project with origins in European thinking, has been surpassed by this project where the essence emanates from an understanding of traditional space-making applied in a contemporary manner, respecting a multi-layered social context in the landscape of Africa.

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2004
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