Mindscape: reintegrating institutions, land(scapes) and communities on the Parktown Ridge
Date
2016
Authors
Pincus, Lindy Lee
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Abstract
The landscape of Parktown tells a story of possession, dispossession, building and
demolition. This thesis challenges the history of the Parktown ridge as always being
a place that has been associated with hegemony, elitism and uncertainty. Instead,
it asks: Can the ridge become a nurturing environment, a place of ‘meditative
pause’? Can it become a cathartic place that reshapes new territorial orders? In
order to do this, two main contextual issues are explored; institutions and land...
Institutions - Parktown forms a large part of the institutional belt of the city.
However, these institutions lie like an archipelago; they are urban islands that
do not interact with one another. This project challenges and deconstructs the
traditional notion of the institution as being trapped in a modernist paradigm -
caught up in a late modernist definition of health, body and mind that speaks of
authority, control and isolation. The building thus becomes the antithesis of this; it
is an open, permeable structure that becomes a public space.
The programme of the building aims to re-conceive the institutions’ role in the
city. It provides a framework for the currently separated health, education and
business communities of Parktown to interact with one other and cross pollinate
their knowledge in the hope that new transgressive orders will emerge. Being sited
next to the largest institution, the Charlotte Maxeke Hospital, allows it to become
a central gathering space in Parktown and provides the opportunity for the
new structure to start interacting with the hospital. It focuses on the importance
of mental health in two manners; it provides a framework where visitors and
outpatients can deal with their trauma, loss and illness in a holistic environment.
Secondly, it explores the myth that the hospital is a contained object, and looks to
explode the issue of health and allow the hospital to have a reciprocal relationship
with the city. The building becomes a central hub where research experiments are
carried out in the city by citizens to study the mental health of the city.
Land - Parktown lies on the Witwatersrand ridge; the founding and defining
feature of the Witwatersrand. However, the ridge’s narrative of mining has
perhaps remained stagnant and has not evolved after mining. Man has become
disconnected from the land and the project sees the ridge as a device through
which this relationship can be repaired, as the ridge moves into a new generation.
This thesis emerges when architecture is used as the method through which these
two issues, of institutions and land, interrogate and interrupt each other. Harmony
between nature versus geometry is explored, which results in a ‘lyrical brutalist’
style. ‘Land’ or nature is used to humanise the ordered, authoritarian nature of
the institution as it carves itself into the building and fragments and softens the
rigidity of the gridded concrete structure. Symbiotically, the building gives new
importance to the traumatised landscape of the ridge. With nature becoming
such an important part of the building, man is encouraged to reconnect with the
land. The ridge no longer becomes a barrier between the north and the south, but
a connector, bringing communities together.
The intervention becomes a place of refuge, a sanctuary in the modernist
landscape. It is a landscape of re-cognition and encourages one to think more
holistically; to break away from the traditional geometries that have dominated
how we think and have new embodied experiences with the land. In so doing,
the project not only acts as a catalyst in the rehabilitation of the scarred natural
landscape but also speculates on an alternative future for technology, health and
education. It gives a new level of social and cultural significance to the hospital
and surrounding institutions, while reclaiming a land we feel disconnected from.
Key words:
Parktown, ridge, nature, concrete,
land, landscape, institutions, hospital,
education, communities
Description
Thesis (M.Arch. (Professional))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, 2016.
Keywords
Citation
Pincus, Lindy Lee (2016) Mindscape: reintegrating institutions, land(scapes) and communities on the Parktown Ridge, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, < http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/22009>