Africa Alliance
Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning
Clint Abrahams
Senior Lecturer, University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa
2024 - 2025 UMAPS Fellow
Clint Abrahams is an architect and senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. He worked at CS Studio Architects (2001-2014) as an architectural technologist, contributing to diverse projects emphasizing social engagement in rural and urban areas. In 2015, he completed his architectural professional master’s degree and joined the UCT's School of Architecture in 2017, teaching design and technology in the undergraduate program. His research in architectural tectonic culture, social engagement, and design-build critically engages with postcolonial portrayals of neglected communities. In 2019, he received the UCT Creative Works Award for his identity formation project "Macassar, Who We Are " and in 2022, the UCT Social Responsiveness Award for the Macassar Storytelling Project, a project that brings people together to document and discuss untold histories of the Macassar apartheid township. His Ph.D. research, "The Tectonics of Empathy," explores creative languages as a relevant academic praxis to describe post-apartheid architectural tectonics of the auto-created city. The study moves away from using apartheid legacies to describe post-apartheid contexts, intentionally choosing to retell the stories of self-made buildings as hopeful and joyful prophetic visions of the post-apartheid South African city. The study involves examining Macassar self-made buildings, using street photography, oral histories, and architectural ethnographic drawings as alternative forms of languages to test whether describing architectural tectonics of the auto-created city can expand on the role of citizens, architects, and tectonics in the making of the post-apartheid South African city and South Africa’s transformation project.
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