//hapo - The Freedom Park Legacy Project

From a distance, against the dusty koppies and dusky jacarandason the outskirts of Pretoria’s civic centre museum one could be forgiven for thinking that “//hapo”, the new addition to the Freedom Legacy Park, is indeed a translation of the Khoisan for a “dream.” The copper clad blocks are designed to evoke the ancient boulders that dot the hillsides and are laid out in an organic cluster that process elegantly across the landscape.

From a closer viewpoint the buildings which house the Freedom Park Museum, the Pan-African Archive, a centre for knowledge and a garden of remembrance are tightly conceived both spatially and symbolically.

Spatially the series of abstracted boulders rise out of a gently landscaped plaza, breach, break, curve and fold into deep, dim fissures. These complex irregularities mimic an ancient landscape and in so doing provide a variety of exhibition spaces delineated by differences of lights and volume.

MODEL SHOTS

ELEVATIONS

PLANS

SECTIONS

Symbolically the copper cladding alludes to the abundant material traded and worked throughout Southern Africa for millennia whilst facilitating the complex surfacing that will, with time, develop a transformative and earthbound patina. The boulder-blocks themselves speak of mountainous shelters of Khoisan healers and pay homage to the rocky Highveld landscape.

The project was designed by GAPP Architects and Urban Designers, Mashabane Rose Associates and MMA Architects, working under the umbrella of The Office for Collaborative Design and would seem to live up to the rare standard already set by some of those practices at the Apartheid Museum.

Project Name : //Hapo Freedom Park Legacy Project
Location: Pretoria, South Africa
Architects: GAPP Architects and Urban Designers, Mashabane Rose Associates and MMA Architects, working The Office for Collaborative Design
Project Area: -
Project Year: 2010
Text: za_architecture