Abstract
M.Tech. (Architectural Technology)
This project is an architectural response to a setting shared by an active open cast platinum mine and the surrounding rural traditional subsistence farming communities located in the Mogalakwena municipality, Limpopo Province. The area is characterised by its mine waste landscape and large open cast pits, all of which are remnants of the process of open cast mining. The Mogalakwena communities’ economic livelihood is largely dependent
on agricultural land. This land is reducing, partly due to the establishment and expansion
of the mine and partly to the increased growth rate of the surrounding communities.
This project argues that the remnants of the mining industry (particularly open cast
pits, mine waste rock and infrastructure) need not be redundant and can be reused
and rehabilitated to result in productive outcomes by establishing the necessary
systemic strategy for transposed use. It contends that the proposed reconfi gured
mining infrastructure programs can be responsive to context (history, environment and
communities), climate and natural processes of the area.
In testing the strength of this argument, diff erent research investigations and theories
were used as was appropriate to each area of research in this topic. These included,
among others, investigations into the history and context of both the mining industry
generally, including its legislative context, and the site specifi cally. Considerations of the
embedded memory of the site were taken into account. Theories which assisted in leading
to a proposed strategy for the site on a contextual scale included theories relating to
contextual productive systems, continuous productive urban landscapes, permaculture
and biomimicry, augmented landscapes, entropic architecture, architecture as a machine
and the mortality of architecture. Ultimately, a proposed solution as an architectural
product was sought.
The following questions had to be answered in a eff orts to produce an appropriate
architectural response to the site and its challenges:
1. How can the role of architecture reconfigure the redundant, disused mine waste
landscape so as to harness a rehabilitative and productive system and how can that
system be managed by the design?
2. How can contemporary rural agricultural projects be challenged to form new
typologies that empower the communities to provide for their own present and
future needs?
3. How can architecture as a system be designed to outlast the temporality of its
program to transform a redundant open cast mining landscape into a productive
landscape?
The architectural intervention is a design of reconfi gured structures aimed at
facilitating a productive and sustainable environment for agricultural advancement,
in order to rehabilitate the existing “minescape” (industrially altered mining land), and
reconcile the use of this land with the history of subsistence farming as practiced by
members of the surrounding communities.
The proposed architectural product strives to create a site and context responsive
architectural program or system by fusing technological strategies into the body
of architecture that are essentially environmental. It aims to employ air, water, sun,
and earth to augment the productive relationship between architecture and the
“minescaped” terrain, thereby creating a Productive Minescape, which yields tangible
positive by-products such as agriculture, renewable energy, water treatment and
harvesting systems, among others. Other productive by-products of the project are
education and research facilities and facilities which aim to provide accessibility and
reconciliation of the stakeholders of this area, to the site and to each other.
The introduction of these systems and facilities will be phase one of the proposed
architectural intervention. However, the intervention is networked, and therefore has
a scalable logic which is envisaged to grow and develop at a much larger and more
intensive scale, suggested to occur over the next 30 years, which are phases two,
three and four (see figures 17 and 18).