Heritage

The rural town of Moruleng is found along the slopes of the Mmammitlwa Mountains in the Northwest province of South Africa. It is the ancestral home of the Bakgatla-ba-Kgafela people. Through a conceptual spatial layering of histories, the precinct forces a complete rethink of the notion of the cultural museum. Numerous historical influences on the Bakgatla-ba-Kgafela community are at play in this space, from pre-colonial stone settlements and systems, to how Christianity and apartheid have affected this rural community, and also a future rich with possibility. The precinct talks to issues of localized identity in a global framework, as you move between age-old beliefs and traditions and present-day realities.

The new covering project conceived for the Domus degli Affreschi, located in the archaeological site of Luni in Italy is based on the reconstruction, with a contemporary twist, of the old volumes of the Domus and of the internal garden. The new roofing project aims to shield the Roman mosaics, recently restored and still visible in the various areas of the Domus.

The assignment consisted of the design of an event center for 1,000 people located in Santiago de Chile. The ruins of an old 19th-century mansion are located on a small hill on the lot.

The restoration of historical architecture in Istanbul has been a fraught issue in the modern period. Istanbul is a city with a 6000-year-old history dating to the Neolithic period with layers upon layers of archaeological remains. Modern architecture and urban planning have often had to contend with these layers causing great disruptions to exist historical and archaeological traces of the city’s past. The embedded geological, structural, and cultural past of Istanbul has in most cases been roughly repurposed and often completely destroyed in the modern period. The needs of the modern city, especially roads for automobiles and new dense urban commercial centers meant that prominent buildings from the Byzantine and Ottoman eras were largely erased from the cityscape. Buildings with architectural value such as the Ottoman İncili Köşk near the Topkapi Palace or the Direklerarası Byzantine era arcade in Fatih were razed in the 20th century due to the growth of the city’s roads.