Infra - structuring architecture: rethinking the ideas of water management within an urban Johannesburg context
Date
2015-04-29
Authors
Vincer, Lionel Ross
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Abstract
No matter the reasons for the birth of a city, water sits at the very heart ensuring a healthy
working population. Johannesburg is one of the only cities in the world that has no major
water source of its own and as a result has its water pumped uphill from the Vaal Dam into
the city. At the same time the city faces a crisis that is based on both the supply and demand
for water. In South Africa, an already water stressed country, it is predicted that precipitation
will reduce over the next century, reducing runoff and the supply of fresh water together with
demand eventually over taking supply.
Through rethinking how the inner city of Johannesburg deals with the saving, purifying and
redistribution of its available surface water, the idea of water infrastructure can become
something more than a subconscious operation controlled from a far off location and pumped
unsustainably back into the city, and more like a series of upgraded machines dispersed
about the city within localized contexts, supplementing the existing vital operations on a very
obvious and conscious level in order to protect its populations by better protecting it’s most
important resource of all. Located within the Maboneng Precinct and more specifically located
over a channel of water that becomes the Braamfontein Spruit, this thesis aims at designing a
building that will incorporate a water treatment facility together with research laboratories to
purify grey water to a standard that is usable for most needs including drinking.
Water however does not exist by itself when placed within the context of any environment that
has an established infrastructural system. It exists together with the many various machines
and pipes hidden from our everyday lives; they are the subconscious networks of the city’s
mind, constantly working in the back(under)ground to maintain a reliable flow and quality
while the populations go about their conscious, daily functions.
The aim is twofold; firstly to show how developing technologies can be experimented on a
smaller neighbour-hood scale in order to encourage the development of new thinking and
secondly, by developing a Water treatment facility and laboratory coupled with daily social
functions as well as offices sited in an urban environment, I hope to show that infrastructural
projects that are usually located on the outskirts of cities, away from every day activity, can
enhance the civic quality of an urban space.
With every system becoming more reliant on technology, water needs to be seen not only as
an entity that exists within the natural cycles of the planet, but one that also exists very much
within the mechanized systems of the city’s infrastructure, with its availability relying heavily
on those systems that manage it as well as the daily social functions that hinge off of it.
Description
This document is submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree: Master of Architecture [Professional] at the University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, South Africa, in the year 2014.