Shape Shifter

Landscape and architecture come together in South African architect Peter Rich’s exhibit at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.

- Garreth Van Niekerk

The 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale – which sees 63 countries presenting their expertise across the floating Italian city – will feature a space dedicated exclusively to the genre-defying work of South African architect Peter Rich.

Opening to the public officially on 26 May, Rich’s career-spanning exhibit forms part of the International Architecture Exhibition that will see 71 architects from around the world responding to the 2018 Biennale’s ‘Freespace’ theme.

Over the six months of the exhibit’s run, nearly a million visitors will encounter the evocative body of work Rich has created during the course of his 40-year career. From the monumental brickwork domes of the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre to his proposed lodges at Silonque Bush Estate in Mpumalanga and Bwanari in North West Province – where the plastic qualities of thatch are explored beyond their limits – his architecture spans a scope of material, and manner, that reflects Rich’s community-collaborative investigation of architecture.

Rich was raised, and is still based, in Johannesburg where, at the time of his studies and entry into his profession, apartheid structures sought to literally dismantle Southern African indigenous architecture. Iron Age ruins were in danger of complete destruction, as were functioning settlements built by amaNdebele people and others living in South Africa at the time.