Johannesburg, South Africa
Adjaye Associates along with MMA Design Studio design the Thabo Mbeki Presidential Library, a space that celebrates excellence and cultural exchange predicated on the African perspective with structural references of a granary manifesting the concepts of storage, sustenance, planting, and harvesting.
The new Library will feature a multiplicity of functions, including a museum, temporary exhibition space, research center, special collections, auditorium, women’s empowerment center, reading room, shop, cafeteria, digital experience space, seminar rooms, office space, and an archive center.
The Thabo Mbeki Presidential Library project has been awarded a 2021 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
The archive center will act as a repository for the papers, artifacts, and key documents of President Mbeki and other significant African historical figures.
Providing infrastructure for preserving and distributing African history and knowledge, the Library will become a new anchor point and campus for local and international scholars.
Conceptually, the new building makes visible the invisible knowledge of ancient and contemporary African history through both form and program.
Sited in Riviera, Johannesburg, the Library will harbor the knowledge of the land whilst acting as a space for connection in which the advancement of an African Renaissance becomes the premise of the structure.
Represented in design as a metaphor for knowledge-based nourishment, the new building references the structures of granaries — which allow for the extension of grain production and the systematization of cycles of feeding, planting, and harvesting.
Using architecture as a tool to reimagine storage and sustenance into form, the granary stores guide the overall building concept.
The eight cylindrical granary-styled forms are made contemporary through the topping of domes with apertures that take into consideration the solar orientation of light within the site to create a distinct atmosphere for each of the programs within.
The internal infrastructure of these chambers sees to it that the building accommodates a multiplicity of programmatic functions.
They are connected through an ‘indoor den’ — a horizontal interstitial space that extends the length of the entire building to provide a new public space in service to the community.
Project: Thabo Mbeki Presidential Library
Architects: Adjaye Associates
Architect of Record: MMA Design Studio
Client: Thabo Mbeki Foundation
Contractor: MMA Design Studio
Photographer: Ngozi Olojede
