Usually representing spirits, ancestors or the primordial couple, these figures were placed in shrines and treated with great respect. Through a wide range of style, scale, belief and function the couples depicted share a timeless, serene equality necessary to the continuity of their societies.

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Discovery Place / Boogertman and Partners

Futuristic and fluid, Discovery’s new global headquarters bring together 5000 employees who were previously housed in four separate buildings. Efficiency and future growth underpin the new workspace, which is the largest new build to date to receive a 5 Star Green Star rating by the Green Building Council South Africa. In line with Discovery’s holistic approach to health, the building was imagi...

Morvest Headquarters / Anthrop Architects

A campus to serve as the headquarters for the Morvest Business Group is situated adjacent to the Ben Schoeman highway. The client is a rapidly growing holding company requiring a flexible programme to house the various constituent companies and their associated functions. The campus comprises three buildings (two three-storey office buildings and a single-storey training and events centre) orie...

I-CAT Offices and Warehouse / Earthworld Architects

The Client’s brief was to create a flagship building based on ecological sustainable principles which would showcase their philosophy toward the natural environment. Thus, the design response was a building that would be sustainable on all three levels; ecological, socially and economical. Understanding that these three pillars of sustainability influences one another, the objective was to find...

Old Mutual Central Campus / Perry + Anderson Architecture

This project was to create a new business school for the Old Mutual Investment Group. Careful consideration of the existing campus of buildings at the head office of Old Mutual in Cape Town saw the positioning of the new training facility in an underutilized courtyard and existing ground floor office space.

Sasol Place / Paragon Architects

The new Sasol corporate office on Katherine Street brings together all 6000 staff members from its eleven satellite offices into one office space. The building leaps the boundary of the commercial edge of Sandton to hover as a floating glass box above an indigenous parkland.

Akili Towers / Richard Keep and Henry Goss Architects

Akili Tower is a 30 storey mixed use tower in Upper Hill, Nairobi designed by a Richard Keep Architects and Henry Goss Architects collaboration. The proposed site is on the prow of the hill over looking the Uhuru Park and the Central Business District. The shape of the tower is defined by the above ground requirement for car parking which forms the 6 levels separating the lower 3 levels of reta...

15 Alice Lane Annex / Paragon Architects

The context of this project had a profound impact on its design. This is the sixth building on the Alice Lane Precinct and sits in the southern corner. An early decision was made to rehabilitate the structure rather than demolish it. There were compelling reasons for doing so, including cost and time benefits.

Lideta Mercato Market / Vilalta Architects

The Lideta Mercato was supposed to be a shopping mall like many in the city of Addis Ababa. After analyzing the existing ones we realized that they have 3 weak points: they are empty because the shops are too big, their glass facades create heating and bring too much light in the inside and their image does not reflect Africa, neither Ethiopia’s character. On the other hand, the Old Mercato of ...

Maroc Telecom Tower / Jean-Paul Viguier and Associates

Like many historic cities, Rabat is proud of its past but also eager to look to the future. The city could not, therefore, avoid the necessity to grow while combining tradition and modernity.

Sapiens Building / Costalopes

The Sapiens Building is located in a former industrial zone 500 metres from the Avenida Marginal and the Bay of Luanda. The plot contains two other buildings: in the north-east, the headquarters of the INSS, the 14 storey Angolan Social Security; and in the south-east, a 20 storey residential building named Kings Tower.

1st Congress Tower / Costalopes

The 1st Congress Tower is located in Luanda, the capital of Angola. The project equates itself around four fundamental conditions: the program for a banking institution - corporate and generic offices but with a socio-cultural area - with an inevitable intensive occupation of the available plot; the prime location in Largo Lumeji, with its strong public profile, one of the joints in the city's ...

Mazars' 54 Glenhove / Paragon Architects

The just completed office complex for Mazars in Johannesburg marks a paradigm shift from the idea of commercial architecture. While it seeks to convey the companies values and inbuilt traditions, it departs from a conventional office complex and borders into an abode. The toned down concrete, playful facades and expansive forms break apart the massing of the project and connect at the entrance ...

Department of International Relations and Cooperation / TC Design Architects

Completed in just 24 months from the start of construction in May 2007, the DIRCO project involved bringing an unusually eclectic, asymmetrical design to reality. The importance of the building’s aesthetic appearance meant that innovative engineering solutions had to be developed for even simple structures.

Alice Lane Phase 1 Marsh / Paragon Architects

The design of this building formed the last important piece of an urban puzzle. The volumes of the building needed to terminate views on the piazza design. It needed to allow a transparent view through the building’s punched views with gardens but also defining the edge without killing the piazza’s relationship with the sky or the views. The building was awarded Best Commercial Building at the ...

FNB Westbank Building / Architect Consortium

The new FNB home loans and Wesbank building in the North of Johannesburg was designed in consortium with 3 other practices. It is an eclectic mix that resonates well with traditional African design tenets of amalgamated forms and landscapes which ultimately create a skin of intricate shells and forms that almost always seem to work together in acrimonious harmony. The idea was an attempt at mod...

Re-Tour – Casablanca / Kilo Architectures

The Re Tour project marks a marked emphasis on the maintenance of 20th century heritage and offers new ways to ever changing dynamic of investment and seeks to solve the ever troublesome matter of preserving architectural heritage vis a vis commercial investment.

Stone Towers / Zaha Hadid Architects ZHA

Stone Towers, named for an ancient petrified tree at the heart of this new development, comprises state of the art office facilities for a rapidly expanding city, alongside a five star hotel, serviced apartments, restaurants, bars and a central landscaped area, the ‘Delta’. Our design mediates two distinct ‘edges’ – high speed ring road to the north and residential component to the south. Delib...

BDO_22 Wellington Road / Paragon Architects

The BDO building lives to an agenda of a street relationship, something not seen much in South African commercial work. The restaurant particularly embraces the street with an inviting roof garden, planter boxes and trees and invites people to enter. This is a new development from a site that was demolished to make way for a new 8000m2 multi-tenanted office complex occupying 5 storeys and 4 lev...

The Energy Works / Daffonchio and Associates

In this project we were required to create an energizing, uplifting work environment by linking a new, high-tech construction to the existing building, a 1940’s single storey house. The clients requested that the building be independent from the electrical and water utilities by means of on-site production, harvesting, and efficiency. The carbon footprint had to be minimal and had to be evaluat...

Namibia Offices For Mineworker’s Union / Wasserfall Munting Architects

Positioned on the northern side of one of the major vehicular arteries into Katutura, the new head office of the Mine worker’s Union is located in a neighborhood of poorly maintained and heterogeneous architectural typologies. The site is bordered on the western side by a small stream that drains in a southerly direction and separates it from the neighboring residential precinct and its informa...

Aon Insurance Headquarters / SPASM Design Architects

India sits geographically as one of the countries that benefited greatly from the influx of great world architects who sort to spread their mantra and get their work on the ground up. It is perhaps with this stimulus that SPASM Design takes off with a building that reminds you of an early Lecorbusier, a vibrant beguiling clean lines open spaces mentality that is so clean and profusely tradition...

One Airport Square / Mario Cucinella Architects

One Airport Square is a world-class multi-functional building minutes’ walk from the most important venues in the city. It was designed by the award-winning sustainability architect, Mario Cucinella Architects.It hosts 2,000 sqm of commercial spaces on the ground floor and ten-floor office block on the southwest of the lot, due to the specific form and orographic features of the site.

Koudougou Central Market / Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation + Laurent Séchaud

Designed as an urban community project, the mission and end goal of the design was to improve the human spirit by responding to the growing need for clean water, power, shelter, healthcare and education. Being an Aga Khan Award-winning design, the Central market in Koudougou involved not just the construction of a physical urban infrastructure, but also the elaboration and implementation of a p...

Taxi Rank No. 2 / 26'10 South Architects

Diepsloot is the kind of environment that requires input from the best, most courageous and inspired architects. It is not every architect who would have the patience and willingness to learn from this environment, or the humility necessary to create opportunities and bring human dignity to it, where it is most needed. The reality is that most people on earth live within conditions of informali...

Offices for Bührmann & Partners / Wasserfall Munting Architects

The result of a mini competition, the new office complex for Bührmann & Partners Consulting Engineers is the manifestation of a longstanding working relationship between the respective practices – and more particularly between Sigi Teetz and Jaco Wasserfall – that began almost two decades ago and has since matured into a dynamic partnership built on mutual respect and a shared passion for a...

The Mauritius Commercial Bank Ebene / Jean Francois Koenig Architect

Few projects within Mauritius pride themselves in having a keen sense of contextual performance and impact. The Mauritius Bank Building has had a marked influence, not only on The Mauritius Commercial Bank as a brand , but to the wider public of Mauritius. People have reacted very positively to the building and identify it to representing themselves . Its instantly recognisable shape has bec...

102 Rivonia Deloitte Head Office / Boogertman + Partners

It’s a project that Boogertman calls pulsating, and rightfully so. Debatably eclectic and somewhat ostentatious in its standing especially in a small city scape that is coming up in the Sandton area, the 102 Rivonia project does well to stand in its bustle opulence and maintain a steady poise. It is a building that taken away from its clichéd context would be too much to the eye, but Sandton is...

Corner Jellicoe Avenue and Oxford Road / Paragon Architects

The ‘Tiber Rosebank’ development occupies this key site in the fast changing Rosebank node in Johannesburg with confidence. It takes a definite stance as a hard-edged work of urban architecture on the edge of the Rosebank business node, yet deals respectfully with the scale and texture of the lush forest-like setting of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs.

Casa Port Railway Station/ AREP

Casablanca is a modern city in Morocco with a concentration of Art Deco and international style and modernist buildings which tries to draw a lot from the vernacular Moorish architecture of the area. It is a modern city which has undergone change in a short time from experimental lifestyle of the residents. The city urban planning is also undergoing reorganization hence the Casa Port Station fi...

Regulation for Postal Communication Authority ARPT Headquarters / Mario Cuccinella Architects

The Mario Cucinella conceived building seems to rise from the ground like a creature eager to explore the world after a long hiatus in hibernation, it is a building categorically envisioned as a series of dunes, a clever literal abstraction of nature towards the art of form making, something the firm of Cucinella has come to be identified with. Though still at its infancy in feasibility stage, ...