25th Corobrik student of the year Awards 2011 | Jurie Swart
25th Corobrik Architectural Student of the Year Awards which honour the top architectural
graduates from seven institutions throughout South Africa was held on the 7th March 2012
in the Ballroom at the Wanderers Johannesburg.
My dissertation: Borderline – Mediated landscape, a Water Research Centre for the
University of the Free State (Qwaqwa campus), explores whether nature and architecture
can be amalgamated to become a hybrid solution in a vast landscape which has lost its reference to place and time. The transformation of place and time through architecture results in a progressive fusion giving meaning to a certain non-place lacking character and special qualities and resulting in an awakened space.
By exploring nature’s design and introducing biomimicry (the act of mimicking or copying biology)
the obvious clues in nature can be applied to architecture which will ultimately result in the creation of a hybrid building- a building self-sustaining and adaptive to its surroundings.
When fusing man and nature a hybrid or borderline is born. This borderline identifies the existing
conditions when the superimposition of various systems take place, reacting and colliding to provide a new landscape, a mediated landscape. This progressive hybrid is in constant transformation with nature. As the design allows nature and architecture to become a symbiotic fusion of one another, it is clear that the self-sustaining hybrid becomes a living organism with an important function, research.
