CODESA Museum

PROJECT INFORMATION

Client: CODESA Type: Design Proposal
Project Status: Never Realised
Address: Ekurhuleni Municipality

The CODESA MUSEUM proposal involved developing an architectural concept and feasibility study for a museum complex with associated landscaping within an existing park. The project was commissioned by the Ekurhuleni Municipality.  The museum was envisaged as an interpretive, cultural and history centre, covering the “birth of the new South Africa.”  

The brief called for a museum that would be an interactive, multi-media, multi-arts and multi-design experience. It would share the heightened and final moments of the dying Apartheid system, and the prospects and realization of Freedom. Features - such as touch screens; well narrated stories; dramatic photography; installation art and paintings; cutting edge graphic design; authentic artefacts; memorabilia and collections from all the players, witness accounts and testimonies; daring spatial design linked to narratives; bold African colours as in the South African flag; application of the 11 official languages; and focus on the struggle of the communities of Ekurhuleni; - attract the knowledgeable, the casual visitor, the student and the tourist and the youth.

As a brand, and a new identity, it was imperative that the approach to content and context, the design in architecture and interiors, should move away from the Apartheid, Hector Pietersen and Lillies Farm Museums’ signature look and feel. More intense, more humane, more inclusive of the unedited voices of all political, cultural and ethnic trends that played a role in the making of CODESA.

The Landscaping Plan was integral to the architectural development with part of the structure integrated into the lake and lighting design that would enhance the attraction of the lake and building at night.