Top master’s in architecture student at Mandela University Gideon Williams has won a “Commendation” (effectively a second-place prize) in the Mandela 2023 Corobrik National Student of the Year Competition’.
Students from each of the eight Architectural Learning Sites in the country, compete to be acknowledged as the “National Architectural Student of the Year” in the annual Corobrik Competition, now in its 37th year.
Usually, only a first prize is awarded, but with the competition running so close this year a commendation was awarded to Gideon, keeping the Mandela University Architecture flag flying high, says Andrew Palframan, Director of the School of Architecture.
Mandela University has won the competition four times in the last six years and eight times in the competition’s history (Nelson Mandela University and Pretoria University are the only two schools to have won it as many as eight times).
Gideon’s project “The Design of A Citizen’s Archive for King’s Beach” is rooted in the discourse of “Architecture, Identity and Expression” – it is a novel project, which aims to “authentically” express and archive the individual identities and memories of all people of the city…
The project summary refers to inventing “a useless, idiotic, whimsical architecture that houses all the unwanted and unrepresented objects in the city, giving the voiceless a platform to scream.”
Gideon says: “I love exploring ideas and concepts, dreams and whims, and I love the attempt at representation: graphical, sketched, rendered or simply observed. And I also love physical objects, things that are interesting to be around, under, inside of, or on top of. To be frank, I never chose architecture as a career choice, but architecture is a field that encapsulates everything I find fascinating. Architecture somehow amalgamates all my diverging interests and passions”.