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GSA Corobrik Award Ceremony 2020! This year was a challenging year for many but that did not stop the country’s architectural students from producing some of the finest works and dissertations in many major universities. Corobrik has consistently awarded this hard work and 2020 is no different; giving students the opportunity to compete for the national title. Please join staff and students of the GSA in an online exhibition and prize-giving ceremony of our top final year students entered for the 34th Corobrik Student Architectural Awards.

GSA Lecture: WAI Architecture Think Tank with Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski, Friday 27th Nov 2020, 6pm - 8pm SAST. Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski (WAI Think Tank) are currently Associate Professors at Virginia Tech. Their recently published Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education (https://waithinktank.com/Anti-Racist-Education-Manual) posits a powerful and timely rethinking of how contemporary architectural education is observed to embody issues of social injustice and institutional racism. Architectural history and theory is critiqued through the deployment of subverted seminal modern graphic motifs to reframe commonly accepted premises. The GSA hopes to be engaging closely with WAI Think Tank next year and this lecture will serve to introduce and welcome this important new voice to the GSA.

Intimate Frames: GSA Summer Show 2020 This year has seen spatial spillages of the world into our homes - the home holding as a loose epicentre for drawn in spatial imaginaries. Mothers bring in fruit during our Zoom calls, hadedas croon in over the microphone. This, while we pursue Namibia, Dar Es Salaam, the City of Tshwane, Cairo, and inner-city Johannesburg through our laptop screens, our Instagram reel, while sitting at the dinner table, on our beds or at our home work-desk. Domestic life spills over into conversations concerning political frameworks, gender equality, identity, edge conditions, economies and all sorts of global processes at play, in space. GSA Summer Show retreats into intimate views: Celebrating the immense resilience and ingenuity of our students, and the care of our staff, we invite you to share, from your own bedrooms, lounges or kitchens, in this year’s show, promising to be a digital collective experience like no other! Click here for a link to the Summer Show website.

Transformative Practices: Research Paradigms Reflection Session Date: 6 November 2020 Time: 16:00 - 18:00 (SAST) This is the last seminar of this first series of Transformative Practices which is to be continued next semester. This Friday's webinar will provide an opportunity to reflect on the idea of how design research can be understood to operate within varying modes of practice as evidenced in the presentations in October from ecoLogic Studio, Emma Nsugbe, Anastasia Samoylova and Sean Canty. We will outline the planned range of options for the pursuit of advanced design research at the GSA in the form of the MArch (Design Theory, Practice) and the PhD options (through traditional, design-led and practice-based approaches) and describe how these will be structured in the next academic year.

Sean Canty will be presenting a lecture this Thursday (29th October). This lecture is part of a series to be held in October, and will, through conversations and presentations, address the topic of design research. All lectures are free and open to the public, and earn CAT 1, 0,3 CPD credits per hour attendance.

Transformative Practices: Research Paradigms RE1.3 Anastasia Samoylova Date: 23 October 2020 Time: 16:00 - 18:00 (SAST) These seminars will investigate different modalities of design research and how in practice-based -research, tacit and embedded knowledge surfaces in the process and production of design to reveal motivations and influences. We will explore the expansive diversity and differentiated representation of design research and how such research might inform broader practice. Invited cultural practitioners will share their research practices.