EcoHouse Research

Peter Rich

 

Peter Rich is a principal architect at Peter Rich Architects in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Professor of Architecture at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. In 2011, he held the chair of the John Williams Fellowship at University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture. Arkansas students under his mentorship collaborated with students from the Department of Architecture at the Kigali Institute of Technology in Rwanda, in researching and designing appropriate sustainable urban housing for Rwandans.

As an activist during the apartheid era, Rich documented indigenous settlements of the black population such as the Ndebele people, who faced displacement from the government. Rich studied South African vernacular architecture and informal housing, which prepared him to design social housing projects and community based Cultural tourism projects, after the fall of the apartheid regime in 1994 for the democratically elected government of Nelson Mandela.

Rich has since developed a contemporary architectural vocabulary built upon sustained research of local context and close collaboration with communities. For the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre (awarded the "Building of the Year" at the World Architecture Festival in 2009), completed with engineers John Ochsendorf of MIT and Michael Ramage, local craftsmen learned to build with ancient clay-tile vaulting techniques. Rich together with Michael Ramage and Tim Hall has recently established Light Earth Design, which is implementing projects in Central, East and North Africa. The recent Alexandra Heritage Center is a community space and center to record oral histories of residents in the historic township of Alexandra, where Mandela formulated his political resistance. In 2010, Rich was awarded the South African Institute of Architects Gold Medal, the Instituteʼs highest honor for his achievements in architecture.