Our People

Hilton Judin is an architect in the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits University. He developed the exhibitions [setting apart] with History Workshop in Johannesburg and District Six Museum in Cape Town. He was curator and editor with Ivan Vladislavi? of the exhibition and book blank____Architecture, apartheid and after (NAi Publishers, 1998) for the Netherlands Architecture Institute. He was in practice with Nina Cohen on the Nelson Mandela Museum in Mvezo and Qunu and the Living Landscape Project in Clanwilliam.

He is author of Architecture, State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital (Routledge, 2021), and editor of the volumes Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins: Persistence of the Past in the Architecture of Apartheid (Wits University Press, 2021) and, with Ali Khangela Hlongwane and Arianna Lissoni, In Whose Place? Confronting Vestiges of Colonialism and Apartheid (Jacana, 2024).

E-mail: hilton.judin1@wits.ac.za

Dr Sechaba Maape is an architect, artist, and academic at the Wits School of Architecture and Planning in the heart of Johannesburg. He heads the award winning first-year design studio which since his appointment has been transformed to be amongst the few design studios that explicitly incorporates indigenous knowledge as part of the curriculum. Maape also supervises architecture masters and PhD degrees focusing on post-colonial discourses, indigenous knowledge and sustainability.

In 2023, Maape was appointed as co-curator for the South African Pavilion at the Venice architecture Biennale, as well as an exhibiter.

Maape and his team created a structure that mimicked the dark ancient caves of the Northern Cape Province, in which Maape embedded towering digital drawings that are inspired by the cave art of his ancestors, in effect creating a ritual space for deep planetary habitation at the Biennale.

E-mail: Sechaba.Maape@wits.ac.za 

Dr Ludwig Hansen, PhD, is the Director of Campus Innovation Laboratory  (CIL), which he co-founded with Prof. Elleh at the School of Architecture & Planning, University of Witwatersrand. His PhD on Post-1994 South African University Infrastructure: A Critical Study of the Framework and Spatial Principles to guide future developments, is an innovative practice-based research. Hansen’s collaborations with Paul Wygers at Urban Solutions produced numerous award winning buildings and urban design projects, including the Constitutional Court and Hill projects, Coega, the DTI Head office in Pretoria, the Street Trader Management Plans, and its implementation, and Baragwanath Spatial Framework.

At Ludwig Hansen Architects and Urban Designers (LHA+Ud), Hansen led the design of numerous large scale projects and university master plans including for the University of the Witwatersrand, the Sol Plaatje University (SPU) in Kimberley, and the University of Mpumalanga( UMP) in Nelspruit, along with 1200 seater Great Hall. LHA+Ud also advised and completed campus spatial survey plans for the 26 major South African university campuses, and the firm is currently involved in the development of two new university colleges at Hammanskraal and Boksburg. The office in Cape Town focus on commercial developments, urban design, and residential projects.

Murray Fraser is Professor of Architecture and Global Culture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK.

He has published extensively on design research, architectural history & theory, urbanism, post-colonialism and cultural studies. His book Architecture and the 'Special Relationship' (2008) won the RIBA President’s Research Award and Bruno Zevi Book Prize. Other publications include Design Research in Architecture (2013), now a standard work. He was General Editor of Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture (21^st Edition; 2020), awarded the Colvin Prize by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.

In 2018, Murray received the Annie Spink Award for Excellence in Architectural Education, the RIBA’s highest teaching accolade. Previously editor of The Journal of Architecture, he now co-edits the ARENA Journal of Architectural Research (AJAR). He is ex-Chair of the SAHGB, and a visiting professor at both the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Nanjing University.

Eva Branscome is Professor of Architecture and Cultural Heritage at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK. Her teaching approaches architectural history & theory in several ways: as an independent field of study, as directly relevant to students’ design processes, and as a factor within heritage environments. Alongside PhD supervisions, she coordinates or tutors on Bartlett architectural history & theory modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, notably the MA Architectural History.

Originally trained as an interior architect, her research follows two strands: the links between built heritage and cultural practices in contemporary cities, and the modern architectural history of Central Europe. She is the author of Hans Hollein and Postmodernism (2018), the first major monograph about that famous Austrian architect-artist. Increasingly her research examines the complicity of architecture with social injustice, seen in the 2023 UCL/SAHGB conference she co-organised on ‘Constructing Coloniality: British Imperialism and the Built Environment’.

E-mail: e.branscome@ucl.ac.uk