OUR DES BAKER COMPETITION ENTRY

The Des Baker Student Architectural Competition tasked students from universities around South Africa to design a ‘box’ that could act as a tool for communication and reconciliation amongst South Africans of different backgrounds. The structure needed to have dimensions of not more than 5x5x5m and was required to potentially be transportable to the University of the Free State’s campus. I worked with 2 other students from my class to design The Language Beatbox (for which we placed in the top 3 of the UCT submissions). We all developed many iterations of forms for our beatbox and then workshopped our designs to ultimately arrive at one we considered to have both functional specificity and an engagement with its wider environment, as well as effective acoustic properties. We developed the design in AutoCAD and Sketchup, finally creating a 1:2 model using layered corrugated card. We worked as a team but took on individual responsibilites. My main roles were to develop the concept of the project, to determine how to present the project in relation to the goals of the competition and for CAD work to shape our structural elements.