James Breytenbach

The site of architectural enquiry is situated on a historic buffer zone between Lombardy and Alexandra. Posing a lingering spatial tension and legacy of apartheid spatial planning, which remains in place as a material and environmental inequality, with the site being used as a dump for building waste. This investigation proposes to work with these material inequalities to recode this vulnerable landscape as a public space, market and campus for material reuse and alternative fabrication studies that are aligned with the natural and material processes of the site.

The waste dumped here has its effects on the residents of Alexandra, causing floods and perpetuating a marginalised landscape of rubble and dust. However, it is also a spatial and material resource, being utilised as a source of second-hand materials, and recyclables, supporting multiple micro economies. The importance of the area as a non-privatised land, and its value to the community as a fungible spatial resource will be investigated by studying the individual actors that contribute to the landscape, and the combinations of programme that occur.

The relationship between nature and technology will be questioned extensively, as to inform an appropriate architectural response to this anthropocentric landscape. A new architectural formulation of nature is described as a messy entanglement between technology, the environment and the digital representations thereof. Seeing the landscape as an autophagic and autonomously built metropolis in a constant hostile negotiation with its environment that is built and maintained with limited means.

Implementing materialist philosophies to formulate a reconciliation of nature, technology, and culture in the post-Anthropocene for alternative augmented materialities and critical material re-use, that enable environmental and spatial agency. In working together with the human and non-human agents that make up the site to inform space that is mindfully gathered and assembled, building on the nature-culture balance of precolonial times. Informing a new spatial tactic to recode the persistent materiality of the buffer zone as a challenge to the currently inaccessible and technocratic practice of architecture that illudes marginalised spaces.