Charity Chair Cape Town, South Africa Building Project, Architecture Design, Image

Cape Town Chair, South Africa

Urban Charity for Cape Town design by Hofman Dujardin Architects

8 Apr 2010

OYES

‘Magritte in Urbicande’

Design: Hofman Dujardin Architects

The German magazine AIT invited 100 selected architecture and interior design offices across Europe to redesign the ‘ONO’ chair produced the Dietiker company.

The newly designed chairs will be exhibited in the context of a road show in the AIT-Architektur Salons Hamburg, Munich, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Stuttgart. The main auction of the chairs will talk place in spring 2010. The revenues generated through this auction will support the Langa Township in Cape Town, South Africa.

Charity Chair Cape Town images : Hofman Dujardin Architects

After we received the beautiful ONO chair designed by Matthias Weber we asked ourselves why would we transform a beautiful chair? Why would we start cutting, pasting, painting, sewing while the product is good the way it is? We decided to change the approach, in stead of transforming the chair we decided to transform the context.

The chair stays the way it is, we only create a new surrounding stimulating the fantasy of the observer. After studying various options the final choice was to upscale the chair a 1000 times and place it in Cape Town, the final destination of the Charity project.

The chair becomes a model of a building with a height of 760m, an urban icon for Cape Town. The transformation lies within our own fantasy. The mental change due to the overwhelming scale, entirely compensates the absence of physical changement of the chair itself. While the ONO chair can be used by a maximum of two people, the OYES chair with a surface of 800.000m² can host about 50.000 people.

An extremely generous chair!! Four slim feet of 25x30m will touch Cape Town in the business district and the harbor. These four new locations will be connected through identical towers with a height of 460m. Each foot will intervene in the existing urban fabric, connecting people from different areas.

The 800.000m² building will act as a social housing icon. Inhabitants of the Langa township can move to the city centre. Compact apartments are created in the slim feet of 25x30m with a height of 460m. The level of the seat becomes an open space of 450x450m suitable for a public park and soccer fields overlooking the ocean. The back support of the chair will be filled with apartments until a height of 760m.

In between there are shops, offices, sport facilities, cinema, bars, restaurants etc. The OYES chair becomes the iconic symbol of charity, the second tallest building of the world is the shelter of the homeless people of the townships. High-rise for the poor on the South point of the African continent with a view at the Atlantic ocean. A charity project with an impact on humanity.

Power to the people, the skyline used to be dominated by churches, than the financial institutions took over. The time has come that charity and humanity determine the skyline of the future metropolis.

Magritte in Urbicande is the subtitle of the extreme structure. The chair as shown on the carpet is not a chair. As Magritte would say ’……ceci n’est pas une chaise……’ So what is it? It is a model of the worlds second highest building. It is the urban chair which joins to the Table mountain. It is the structure connecting four open plots in Cape Town and thus creating a splendid green park at 460m height offering a stunning view at the surroundings of Cape Town.

The OYES chair seems to be a building copied from the city of Urbicande where the marvelous cubic structure enables the city to function better than ever before. The structure emphasizes on human contacts and creates new relations. The OYES chair shows us a dream, a beautiful thought, a structure which seems outrageous but also refined, appealing and exciting.

Charity Chair Cape Town images / information from Hofman Dujardin Architects

Location: Cape Town, South Africa