Brief

“One must create a Cultural development Lab that echoes the developments taking place within South Africa and at the same time harvests an individual’s potential to engage with the development of a South African culture.”

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To analysis an approach in which to engage with this new project one looked at how a South African culture could be developed. Culture is essentially comprised of memes ‘an element of culture or behaviour that may be passed from one individual to another through non-genetic means.” If culture can be spread like this, then what type of place is required for these memes to stand out and spread virally? For these memes to stand out they should be juxtaposed against a culturally neutral backdrop’ whereby many cultures can relate to the form however the form is not related to any culture in specific. This form should also consist of many places where interactions can take place, and these spaces should be unusual spaces so that the viewer’s senses are heightened in a somewhat ‘fight and flight’ mod, as to allow for the maximum number of memes to be transferred.  As memes are directly related to Darwin’s theory of evolution one should incorporate evolution into the pretence of the building.

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A Fictional Start to the Development of Cape Town
Remove the roads, the curbs and the pavements. Erase the buildings, their inhabitants, and the alien vegetation and bring the see shore back to where it was three hundred years ago. One will find that the Contemporary Harrington square (parking lot/site) is meters away for the see shore and consist of several sand dunes covered in a rampant Fynbos, inhabited by Oystercatchers, reptiles, and small mammals of all shapes and sizes.

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Now bring on the natural weathering processes, add two parallel winds (the South Easter and North Western). Let these winds reshape the sand dunes. Bring back the mountain tributaries and let there be horizontal water erosion over the site. Let the heavens open and bring with it vertical water erosion. Finally re-introduce the contemporary human foot print back on to the site and let the site weather further under these conditions.

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