Play of the Land: Rescripting Mega-Leisurescapes

South Africa holds a traumatic history of injustice which has been propagated by ideologies centered around race. This history is still very present and visible in the scars that fragment its landscapes. These are scars that speak of segregation and unequal distribution of the nation’s resources, in this case, particularly land to practice leisure.

The need for sites of leisure is undeniable and cannot simply be ignored within an attempt to erase traumatic histories. The golf course, therefore, holds the potential to become an infrastructure of resistance, integration and transition where factioned groups are often found within the same space.
This project uses the typology of a golf course and its clubhouse as a site of leisure to build a spatial vocabulary of the epiphenomenon, as identified above, while interrogating the politics, operations and consequences of this leisurescape.

The research will allow for a basis upon which to develop alternative terms for harnessing the singular, impulsive leisure ambitions and the more subversive symbiotic relationships that could be contemplated. Devices and spatial tactics such as land (tenure), spatial programming, circulation and thresholds are carefully choreographed to explore how competing extremes can subversively co-exist while hinged on a central leisure programme. It seeks to explore how architecture can reconcile the socio-spatial politics and the binary tension of leisure and labour.