Tlhologello Sesana is one of the fierce young architects that are disrupting the profession.
The Tshwane University of Technology student's controversial masters thesis topic on the "Forgotten African History" re-imagines colonial spaces and sprung her to the national round of the prestigious Corobrik Architectural Student of the Year awards.
"I wanted to pour out my heart on it, so I had to address everything that is holding us back and I looked at the built environment in the city [Pretoria] and how it is void of cultural significance. I also looked at colonisation and it's impact on native people, particularly the dispossessed communities," Sesana said.
Through her thesis, she is proposing the construction of a redistribution hub in Church Square in Pretoria that would be used as a space to redistribute land. The hub would partly be underground and built using the soil that would be dug out as waste to make a special brick.
"It will focus on redistributing land as well as the spiritual element. It would be reintroducing the spiritual element into the city and on September equinox a spiritual healer would occupy that space and thank God and the ancestors for the newly redistributed land. Light shines directly into that space connecting the heavens and the earth," she said.
She said ultimately healing would be the main theme of the building and it being entrenched in the earth is a rejection of the high rise buildings that have populated the earth.
"The idea is to bury the past so we can live a brighter future... the colonial buildings [in Pretoria] would then occupy space underground and not occupy public space," said Sesana.
Sesana, 28, said she particularly looked at Pretoria because it is the capital of SA and a symbol of colonialism, particularly through its architecture.
"We can see the language of the oppressor expressed through the images of the building, but not the dispossessed community. It is concrete and steel buildings that are devoid of spirituality. When you look at African architecture, most of the buildings that we design we include mother nature because we respect her, our designs are cognisant of that," she said.
Sesana, who hails from Mabopane, north of Pretoria, also has a twin sister who is also studying architecture and said it has been a hard journey but she is proud that she has found her path.
"My sister and I went to a technical high school and we both had bursaries to study civil engineering. Two weeks in we both realised that we didn't want to pursue it because we had already done a lot of the work. Our mother was so livid!" said Sesana.
Sesana has won R10,000 in the competition and stands to win R70,000 in the final when she goes head to head with the regional winners from other universities.
