On September 27, 2020, we were joined by Pulane Mpotokwane!

We discussed Heatherwick Studio's Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town as well as La Sagrada Familia, the still-unfinished project in Barcelona by Antoni Gaudí.

In 2018, Pulane founded Botala Design, a sustainable design consultancy that delivers context-specific built environment solutions.

Pulane previously worked at Arup across the Sustainability Consulting, Urban Design, and Project Planning and Building Retrofit teams in Johannesburg, Gaborone and Mauritius.

Pulane received a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Princeton University and a Master of Science in Sustainable Environmental Design from the Architectural Association Graduate School. She is a Green Building Council of South Africa Sustainable Precincts accredited professional.

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Foil Architecture Chats are informal conversations on Zoom where hosts Mark Acciari and Waqas Jawaid ask guests to discuss two works of architecture in relation to one another.

Foil Architecture Chat With Pulane Mpotokwane: Zeitz MOCAA and La Sagrada Familia

Here's a special Adviser Roundtable of Foil Architecture Chats! Our guests were Hannah Ahlblad, Nicky Chang, Beatriz Lozano, Isidoro Michan-Guindi, Pulane Mpotokwane, and Philip Poon.

In anticipation of the 2020 election, we discussed the controversial Trump Wall (Conceptualized 2014) in relation to the Great Wall of China (220 BC–1644).

According to Arthur Waldron, professor at UPenn and author of The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth, the Great Wall “proved a catastrophic and costly failure that drained the Ming Dynasty’s coffers and failed to prevent its downfall when the Manchus stormed China and established the Qing dynasty, in 1644,” writes Tom Phillips in The Guardian. Waldron says that the “wall was the product of imperial oppression, [and] it cost the lives of many innocent people.”

As for the Trump Wall, as of November 2019, at least 76–78 miles of outdated or dilapidated pre-existing wall had been replaced or reinforced during Trump's presidency; no miles of brand new wall had been completed. The Wall, though, has been used as a rallying cry for Trump supporters and a symbol of exclusion, fear, and oppression for immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, thousands of whom were separated from their children as part of the Trump Administration's "zero tolerance" policy.

While many architects and designers feel ill-equipped to assess a quintessentially architectural device—the wall—in the context of its human implications, we brought together a brave group to do just that!

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Foil Architecture Chats are informal conversations on Zoom where hosts Mark Acciari and Waqas Jawaid ask guests to discuss two works of architecture in relation to one another.

Register for free at https://linktr.ee/foilarchitecture

Foil Architecture Adviser Roundtable: Great Wall of China and U.S. Mexico Border Wall

Foil: Architecture Chats are weekly informal conversations on Zoom where hosts Mark Acciari and Waqas Jawaid ask guests to discuss two works of architecture in relation to one another.