M.Arch Option Studio
Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, Carleton University,
Ottawa, Canada, 2020
Instructor: Ozayr Saloojee
spaces of power
This studio takes Johannesburg, South Africa’s ignominious history as a provocation to explore—through mapping and technical and narrative representation—the spatial and social implications of an extractive terrain. Using drawing as a medium for conceptual and critical inquiry resulted in proposals for a speculative, ethical future for the city’s landscape.
Through mapping, technological and narrative representation, this project reflects on the subterranean world of Johannesburg; the city of gold. An analysis of extraction processes reveals the subsequent spatial implications within economic systems, trade, transportation and physical landscape. Corresponding ‘tools’ shape spatial boundaries and infrastructure throughout the city. The section speculates on the systemic influence garnered by historical power structures; the institutions and symbols that continue to embed themselves in the landscape. A conceptual representation depicts a dystopian Johannesburg where the surface world has deteriorated, yet spaces of ‘underground exchange’ remain present in the terrain, existing in foundations of policy and repression. The composition journeys through the physical embodiment of colonial symbolism above grade (the Rand Club), to a clandestine descent into the conceptual layer of influence; represented as symbols of broken nostalgia (10 Downing, the Pantheon, Cecil Rhodes etc.), and finally through to the mining tunnels in the deep.
