Estate Living Magazine Alfresco Living - Issue 36 December 2018 | Page 48

design
Creating community
through
Communities are living, breathing things.
They develop gradually where people come
together – where people interact, and slowly
co-create the spaces they inhabit. And that
takes time – decades. Centuries even. ‘Each element has to be carefully considered in relation to its
environment, existing and planned infrastructure, and other
buildings,’ says Mthulisi Msimang, Director of Msimang Coetzee
Architects.
But we don’t necessarily have decades or centuries when we’re
building a new estate, and utilising the time-honoured strategy
of trial and error may work out in the long run, but it can be very
frustrating and costly in the short and medium term. So that’s
why architects need to be able to see beyond the walls of the
structures they design. By thinking ‘outside the box’, and taking
into account how every building relates to every other one –
and to a host of other elements – good designers can create
communities rather than just a bunch of buildings that happen
to be close together. In the same way as you need to take into consideration all the
steps that go into storing and preparing food when designing
a kitchen, you need to consider all the possible functions of a
community when designing an estate. ‘And each of those
elements will create its own energy fields,’ says Msimang. If you
build a road, a jogging track, a clubhouse, or even just a bench
in a shady spot with a lovely view, you change the way people
behave in that place. And the changed behaviour affects how
other people behave.
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