Venice Biennale Lecture Series - Session 1

VENICE BIENNALE LECTURE SERIES

Session 1 – Kate Otten Architects and Craig McClenaghan Architecture

This year's Venice Architecture Biennale has a special focus on Africa and a number of South African Architects and GIfA members were privileged to be a part of it.  In celebration of our peers who are currently exhibiting at the Biennale the Gauteng Institute for Architecture is hosting a series of lectures looking at each participant's exhibition, its design and making, and discussing their contributions to the representation of South African architectural thinking to the world.  Session 1 will look at the work of Kate Otten Architects with their installation ‘threads’ and Craig McClenaghan Architecture with their installation ‘Letters from the Landscape’.

Kate Otten Architects

Kate Otten established the practice Kate Otten Architects a year after graduating and has developed it into one of South Africa’s most recognized practices with a varied and prolific body of work, including important public buildings and places of memory. She has received numerous awards in South Africa and internationally and has been widely published. Her practice is known for its focus on weaving together local materials, skills, politics, light, and landscape to create places that feed and nurture the human spirit. Her work is often described as having a ‘strong resonance of place.’ Kate is an active voice for transformative practice, particularly with respect to the role of women. During her term as President of the South African Institute of Architects (SAIA), her inclusive vision of ‘many voices’ was adopted as the theme for re-scripting the SAIA. Locally, she mentors young practitioners, and she examines, lectures, and maintains strong links with several schools of architecture. Internationally, she is an informal ambassador for South African architecture through her engagements as a speaker and juror at international events in locations as varied as Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, and Prague.

Craig McClenaghan Architecture

Craig McClenaghan is a Johannesburg-based architect, exhibition designer, artist, and teacher, with a particular interest in creative research. After graduating from UCT in 2002, he worked for Mashabane Rose Associates for thirteen years before formally establishing his eponymous studio, Craig McClenaghan Architecture - an exploratory, multi-disciplinary design research hub, that engages collaboratively with researchers, writers, artists, curators, educators, and students. Working across a broad range of genres, CMA explores drawing as a mode of design research, often seeking alternate methods of representation throughout the process of design exploration, experimentation, and realization. Recently completed narrative projects include 'Enclosures' - an exhibition of pre-colonial history at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, the Nelson Mandela Capture Site Exhibition in Howick, The Mapungubwe Gold Exhibition at the Javett Arts Centre in Pretoria and ‘Truth to Power’- The life of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, at the Old Granary in Cape Town. Awards include the 2019 regional commendation award from GIfA for the transformation of the Rembrandt Art Gallery at Wits University and a national merit award from SAIA in 2018 for 'Pathways Through Time' at Wonderwerk Cave in the Northern Cape. CMA’s design proposal for the recent Commonwealth War Graves Commission Competition in Cape Town was on a final shortlist of three. Craig has been an invited critic, reviewer, and examiner at several national schools of architecture, and currently leads Unit 21 at the Graduate School of Architecture, at the University of Johannesburg.

Craig was invited to participate in the Laboratory of the Future, in the Curator’s Special Projects, Mnemonic, alongside Adjaye & Associates, Mabel O Wilson, and Looty.

Date: 06 September 2023

Time: 17h00 - 18h30 

Online - Link to be sent a day before the event 

GIfA Members: R100

Non-Members: R200

Students: Free

CAT 1 CPD 0.2 Points