Cemetery inspires winning entry for top award
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Architecture alumnus is regional winner in student of the year award.
Wits alumnus Hashim Tarmahomed (BArch 2018, BArch Hons 2020) is among the five regional winners of the 34th Corobrick Architectural Student of the Year Awards. 
Billed as one of the most prestigious awards programmes of its kind in South Africa, it selects regional winners from eight major universities based on the students’ final theses. The regional winners go through to the national round and the winner will be announced at a virtual ceremony in May and receive a R70 000 grand prize.
Tarmahomed’s project focused on the Avalon Cemetery. South African cemeteries followed the patterns of racial segregation, like its cities, and this one was bisected along Black African, Indian and Coloured sections. The cemetery is a buffer zone between the townships of Soweto, Lenasia and Eldorado Park, where the non-European communities of Johannesburg, were displaced.
“My project examined the site through an archaeological lens, reading the social relations of displacement, dispossession, erasure and marginalisation embedded in the landscape, and rewriting a set of spatial relations onto it. As a project that emphasises the significance of earth for dispossessed communities in the act of burial, clay brick was used as a primary building material,” he said.
What prompted your choice of architecture as a career?
Having always been creative, a career in design was a most natural course to follow. I remember getting lost in Islamic geometric patterns or drawings by [Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis] Escher ?— I think that’s when my relationship with space began. Yet, when pursuing a career in architecture, one constantly unlearns and relearns what it is and what it can be. My pursuit in this field is informed by my geographic background. As an inheritor of displacement, I have always been conscious of spatial and social injustices in a post-apartheid context. The translations of these narratives and counter-narratives into space is what inspires me to do what I do.
I understand you are finishing your Master's, do you have any future plans once it's completed?
At the moment I’m looking towards completing my candidature as professional architect. In the future, I see myself pursuing praxis and academia in parallel, adopting a more interdisciplinary version of architectural practice. I have no interest in following a very defined career path, but rather, one that leaves some room to grow organically. 
Is there something you can pinpoint about the environment at the Wits School of Architecture and Planning that has allowed you to flourish?
I think what I appreciated most from SoAP was a well-rounded syllabus in architecture, balancing theory and practice. Many of the people at SoAP, staff and/or students have been incredible to work with and some of them instrumental in shaping the way I think and design. In particular, I would like to acknowledge my supervisors Kirsten Dormann and Amina Kaskar (BArch 2012, BArch Hons 2014, MArch 2015), without whom this achievement would not be possible.
Are there particular architects (South African or international) who inspire you?
This is a big question! I think architecture, for me anyway, is a discipline that is in between and engages many other disciplines, with the idea of narrative at its centre. So my work is inspired by architects, artists, writers and poets alike. But some of the architects who have left an impression on me, for many different reasons, are people like Hassan Fathy, Louis Kahn, Balkrishna Doshi, Tadao Ando, amongst many others. But I am also inspired by architects who aren't architects — who make small but rich spatial gestures that make up the world around me.