Unravelling nature: integrating architecture and nature
| dc.contributor.author | Katete, Lungo | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-01-23T07:26:21Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-01-23T07:26:21Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024 | |
| dc.description | A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Architecture (Professional) to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2022 | |
| dc.description.abstract | The ability to bring to life what is created in one’s mind, is perhaps the most remarkable feat of human kind. Without the ability to imagine, innovation ceases to exist, resulting in the overall demise of evolution itself. We exist in a time during which the destruction of nature and its essential continues to expand as quickly as nature diminishes right before our eyes. Our environment is populated with built structures and design artefacts, but very few of these rattle the domain of intellect in a way that provokes cultural reorientation. Persuaded by nature’s grand design, this research document proposes a new approach to architecture, through model development and alternative/natural material exploration. It aims to scrutinise the potential of a new way to create architecture through nature’s lens, encompassing formation that consolidates maximal performance and minimal resources through local material variations. In this approach, architecture will be viewed through the lens that is nature, promoting the consolidation of form, materiality and structure. This will be done by exploring aspects such as form development, material analysis and fabrication, allowing for the utilisation of materials found naturally occurring in nature. Materiality precedes form making, allowing for an approach that is structured based on the material properties as a function of structural and environmental performance. This approach shall integrate material properties as a prospective driver of the form generating process, it shall establish how such processes contribute to a novel way of generating, dispensing and depositing material form. In an environment populated primarily by built structures, it is essential that we take into consideration how we can integrate nature’s grand design in the evolution of the design fabric and the built environment process, for without the ability to imagine, innovation ceases to exist. | |
| dc.description.librarian | TL (2024) | |
| dc.faculty | Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10539/37352 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.school | School of Architecture and Planning | |
| dc.subject | Built structures | |
| dc.subject | Design artefacts | |
| dc.title | Unravelling nature: integrating architecture and nature | |
| dc.type | Dissertation |