Sephelane received a R70,000 cash prize for her winning thesis entitled ‘Re[covering] Place: African ways of seeing, thinking and making as a call to rethink and remake places in cities’. The judges’ citation stated that Sephelane “shifted our mindsets to trust our heritage to guide us and to be truly authentic. She narrated the use of the Basotho blanket as a transformative and imaginative symbol of identity and relevance”.
Said Sephelane: “The opportunity afforded to me has validated a lot of what my fellow students, especially people who connect with their culture, have been struggling with, and that is the issue of translating who they are and what their culture entails and the values they bring to their everyday lives and professions.
“The journey is really a beginning for me as I am excited to continue to collaborate and learn from other cultures about such ideas of translation and preservation.”
The seven regional winners presented their theses to an esteemed panel of judges in a Johannesburg studio during May, from where the final winner was selected. The judges were Ludwig Hansen from Ludwig Hansen Architects + Urban Designers, Rahdia Parker from Archi Cape Town, and Adwoa Agyei, director: physical development services at the City of Tshwane.
A special prize for the best use of clay face brick in a project was awarded to Wian Jordaan from the Department of Architecture at the University of Pretoria.
Click here to view the winning projects.
