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Craig McClenaghan is a Johannesburg-based architect and artist, with a particular interest in ‘cultural heritage’. Craig has worked on several museum and exhibition projects, including Liliesleaf, Origins Centre Engraved Rock Gallery and more recently, the Mandela Capture Site Museum exhibition and the transformation of the old Rembrandt Art Gallery at Wits University. In 2016, he formally established his eponymous studio, CMA, an exploratory multi-disciplinary design platform, engaging with researchers, writers, artists, curators, teachers and students. CMA's recently completed walkway installation at the Wonderwerk Cave archaeological research site received an award of merit from the South African Institute of Architects. Craig frequently appears as an external examiner at architectural schools around South Africa and teaches periodically at the University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture.

Thinking of studying a post-graduate degree in architecture? Make sure the Graduate School of Architecture Open Day is in your calendar this winter... Join us on either of the two days offered for expanded responses on some of our frequently asked questions and information for interested students. Click here for more information on the open days.

Counterspace is a Johannesburg-based collaborative architectural studio, directed by Sumayya Vally, Amina Kaskar and Sarah de Villiers. The firm is dedicated to architectural projects, exhibition design, art installation visualisation, public events curation and urban design, which are often rigorously research-based. Counterspace uses Johannesburg - its landscapes, systems, people and rituals - as their main inspiration for creating and approaching projects, with an aim to developing a uniquely Johannesburg and African design language. Their work is predominantly concerned with identity, otherness and imagining new futures; using image and narrative as a means to deconstruct and reconstruct their city. Counterspace has recently completed Folded Skies, a landscape installation set in Stellenbosch and executed in collaboration with StayEvlKids. The installation featured on Dezeen, and the practice on Domus’s Top 100 Architectural Firms of the Year for 2019. Counterspace’s practice also involves an intrinsic relationship with post-graduate architecture schools in Johannesburg: Sumayya as Unit Leader in GSA Unit 12; Sarah as a tutor in GSA Unit 14; and Amina Kaskar at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Architecture and Planning.

This coming semester, the GSA will host an exciting line-up of local and international practitioners, thinkers and makers - sponsored by Boogertman and Partners. Look out on our social media channels for details and updates!

Forgetting Architecture is a three-day event held from 29 July - 1 August which sees four international guests join Prof Lesley Lokko, Dr Huda Tayob and Craig McClenaghan for a series of talks, students reviews and discussions on the theme of memory and architecture, specifically on the role of practices at the edges of architecture (film, performance, landscape and narrative). Over the next three weeks, we’ll be profiling our speakers and sharing details of this exciting event. All talks are free and open to the public, and will be held at GSA Metro at 68 Juta Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg. Click here for more details!

Acting simultaneously as story tellers, architects, time travellers and choreographers of history, students in Unit 12 at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, visited a Morocco, looking specifically at the Atlantic Coast as a site of historic significance in the histories of migration and settlement. Continuing the Unit’s interests in cultural identity, race, gender and architecture, students this year are tasked with developing new architectural and spatial vocabularies that speak to the rich themes of migration, diaspora and hybridity. The Major Design Project of the year is a New Port Authority (NPA). In different forms, ports are the earliest point of contact with a new region for migrants. The history of the establishment of ports is also intrinsically linked to the history of slavery and of the formation and policing of borders. The port is a space of crossing, of transition, of crossover.