Project Title: 

Project Location: Pretoria 

Project Focus Area: Memory, Legacy and Identity 

Supervisor(s): Johan Swart

Project Description: 

This dissertation project investigates the shortcomings and potential of the public health facilities in the City of Tshwane through the lens of the current diabetes epidemic. Various spatial, social, and institutional shortfalls are identified and dissected to inform possible architectural solutions. The disparate nature of services, urban sprawl, ageing hospitals and lack of community engagement and education hinders healthcare for the majority of the population.

This proposal suggests a complex networked approach that envisions various architectural additions throughout the city and the existing healthcare nodes. These additions will improve service delivery and enable healthcare and community support where none existed before. To enable this network, a catalyst project is required: A core facility that researches, produces and tests these satellite interventions within a controlled environment before being deployed throughout the city.

To drive and manage the envisioned system and network, this facility will centralise administration, development, research and community engagement to effectively and radically change the healthcare fabric of the city. The centrally located Tshwane district hospital will host this facility within various underutilised existing buildings. This approach requires the adaptive reuse of significant heritage structures on a historically sensitive site. The architectural response is thus an investigation of appropriate interventions and additions within this sensitive context to achieve multiple layers of programmes. Combining the programmes of spatial research and medical services creates opportunities where user responses can be observed through multiple medical typologies. This spectrum of investigation is achieved by providing a broad set of medical services throughout the site.

The architectural technological response of the project is a combination of structural insertion into existing buildings, internal reconfiguration and the restructuring and addition of public urban space around and through the site. Radical changes to the site is achieved with the project that envisions healthcare buildings as public spaces while providing rich opportunities to drive South African healthcare forward through research and education.