Utopian Cosmos: First year architecture project exhibition

The Wits School of Architecture and Planning will host this exhibition.

At the Wits School of Architecture and Planning recent cross disciplinary studies have revealed parallels between African indigenous knowledge systems (storytelling, myth and ritual) and the philosophy of embodied knowing. These discoveries have led to the development of a first year architecture design brief that attempts to explore and exploit the opportunities for an architecture of world making. In the Utopian Cosmos project, students used lived experience, embodiment and narrative (film and storytelling) as ways of engaging the subject and subjectivity of world making through architecture. Students were briefed in groups to create a community in which they develop social orders, rituals, cultures and values. From this they developed a cosmogenesis narrative for their community, a story of their beginnings and designed a place where this story can be told, modeled it and presented the narrative as a short animation. This was followed by a full size re-interpretation of their ritual space as a stage set for a performance at the Wits Amphitheatre.This project is a response to the underlying limitations of the objectivist paradigm to deal with the subjectivity of humanity and a changing  world, and in this way responds to the call for a decolonised curriculum at institutions of higher learning.

Add event to calendar