Moruleng Cultural Precinct / Office 24-7 Construction
Textual content material description provided by the architects. The agricultural metropolis of Moruleng is found alongside the slopes of the Mmammitlwa Mountains throughout the Northwest province of South Africa. It’s the ancestral residence of the Bakgatla-ba-Kgafela people. By the use of a conceptual spatial layering of histories, the precinct forces an entire rethink of the notion of the cultural museum. Fairly just a few historic influences on the Bakgatla-ba-Kgafela group are at play on this space, from pre-colonial stone settlements and strategies, to how Christianity and apartheid have affected this rural group, and likewise a future rich with probability. The precinct talks to issues with localized identification in a worldwide framework, as you progress between age-old beliefs and traditions and present-day realities.
The transient for the mission was to renovate the prevailing museum, restore the adjoining historic Dutch Reformed Mission Church, and develop a cultural precinct. The layering of newest and heritage architectural constructions and landscapes as palimpsest is an integral part of the spatial, exhibition, and narrative experience. All by the precinct, a deliberate effort has been made to permit friends to inform aside between historic renovations, pre-colonial reconstructions, and the model new elements on the positioning. The raked amphitheater kgotla has been carved into the panorama with a latticed pergola building providing shading. The pergola design is a latest reinterpretation of the lekgapo patterning traditionally used on flooring and partitions, using lathes and metallic. When the photo voltaic is overhead, gorgeous shadows of these typical patterns are stable on the underside.
Landscaping was used to establish a unifying framework and to implement and enhance new relationships between the heritage buildings on the positioning. Our intention was to check out the historic previous by a broad lens, and as such the landscaping overlays and reconfigures the underside through the use of typical stone partitions, reconstructing the pattern of a close-by Iron Age Tswana settlement.
Visitors cross the stonewalled constructions and through the landscaped terrain to the restored Dutch Reformed Mission Church, inbuilt 1889. In 2009, the church was a digital spoil. It was an empty shell with crumbling brickwork, broken church pews, missing doorways and residential home windows, and a thick defending of chook and animal droppings. However the potential was clear. The sluggish nevertheless rewarding technique of restoration was undertaken, with every small aspect rigorously thought by. All we would have liked to go on had been two historic images from the late Nineteen Thirties and early Sixties. We would have liked to extrapolate from these what the character of the distinctive setting up would have been. We left a whole lot of the distinctive brick unplastered, juxtaposed in direction of new insertions. A model new ramp was constructed to handle stage modifications and accessibility. It was product of darkish brick to duplicate that it’s a contemporary insertion, and shadow aspect was used to separate it from the distinctive building. Proper now the church capabilities as a multifunctional exhibition and event space.
