Boksburg’s landscape is home to many left-over, forgotten, and wasteful spaces which offer no return. This dissertation will explore these elusive landscapes, and through design, breach one of these thresholds. Humans long for refuge. Nature should return. This dissertation explores the theory of ‘liminality’. This theory was used to understand the notions related to event. The application of the ‘liminal’ occur in a transient and a material manner. The three narratives, within this dissertation, that marry this theory are: the ‘cloud’, the ‘wetland’ and the ‘landscape’. The youth culture of Johannesburg seeks release from the quotidian. Can an understated city on the East Rand of Gauteng host a public space that caters for different user groups? Can this public space be appropriated for events? Can this public space supply Johannesburg with a definition for a ‘beach’ in a landlocked city? The architecture is to conjure a sense of liberty and choice within the users and the role of architecture is to create a platform for diversity. The design aims to construct a place where society can re-create itself; where nature can reconcile the damaged environment; and where event can serve to produce ephemeral architecture to make [other\younger\ better\greener] worlds.

Abstract: Access (the modern paradox): Borders, much like Architecture, can be described in one of two ways. The one is the simple way, and the other a more complex – but unsettling – way that is open to contradiction. On the surface, a border is a threshold or boundary that constrains the separation of two or more entities. Yet, the more complex understanding is harder to define and because of that it requires limitations, or a different point of view to be able to comprehend. In the case of defining architecture, it can be seen that Architecture is: the art and science of building. Although, this isn’t actually the case, if it was the case practicing Architecture and designing buildings would be easy. There is a complex, more pluralistic way of interrogating Borders and Architecture. Put simply, borders define themselves in the eye of their user. This means that a border to a sociologist, or anthropologist, will be read in a completely different way to an engineer, or will be read differently by a geographer to an immigrant. It becomes obvious that there can never be a complete, all encompassing understanding of what a border is, or can be. A border will always be limited in one way or another, and will always be contested once it has been mapped on to paper. Could there possibly be a way to subvert, dilute or transgress a border or the notion of a border though architecture? Is there an architectural intervention, either physical or metaphysical, that could take on the role of the subversive, dilutor or transgressor? Can a border become actionable and create a place of ACCESS? / MN (2016)