Magazine Hill : a weathered continuum

Abstract

NDLTD Innovative ETD Award 2012. This dissertation is rooted within a process of unification, a personal struggle to understand the fragile relationship that exists between architecture and time. The project focuses on architecture’s potential to adapt according to the passage of time, through the process of aging and weathering. This study is founded in the aim to re-establish a connection between the continuum of time and architecture. The project places contemporary commemorative architecture under the limelight, criticising the static notion of heritage commemoration through the typologies of museums and memorials. These typologies often evolve into static monuments, where the relevance to contemporary society can be questioned. The architectural response of this dissertation is thus focused on commemoration through everyday use. The proposed historical site (Magazine Hill) forms a comprehensive construct of different layers of time and influence. This mysterious, abandoned and isolated site consists of two ammunition magazines, five bomb shelters and ammunition factories, all structures that represent an era of unrest in South Africa. In 1945 a mysterious explosion of the Central Magazine scarred the face of Magazine Hill, leading the activities on the site to an early death, trapping architecture in time and abandonment. The proposed programme forms part of the conceptual premise of mediation, unifying different opposites inherent in both Magazine Hill and the South African context. A brass foundry is proposed to recycle the spent ammunition shells of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), thereby introducing brass artists as a public interface to Magazine Hill. Where ammunition was once produced, ammunition is now reduced. This programme could form mediation between the public and the military; exposing different layers of the past by reinstating a connection between architecture and time. View Clifford Gouw's video on <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVnn-sDfR_U ">YouTube</a>. Copyright 2011, University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria. Please cite as follows: Gouws, C 2011, Magazine Hill : a weathered continuum, MArch(Prof) dissertation, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, viewed yymmdd < http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-11302011-195515 / > C12/4/86/gm