School and Skills Centre for Mentally Impaired Children | Anri van der Wath

This mini-treatise investigates the effects of architecture on inhabitants and questions to what extent architecture could have transformative properties on its user. A school for mentally impaired children is proposed in the urban setting of Bloemfontein and provides the opportunity of re-incorporating a distanced culture back into the urban society.

A problem within the South African urban culture has been identified within the inseparable connection between person and surroundings. Considering the result of the link between person and place, the development of urban space and architecture has had separating effects of mentally impaired individuals within this society from the urban lifestyle. Architecture, combined with its transformative effects, could act as an effective vessel in order to compress the barriers between mentally impaired individuals and the city lifestyle, in the South African urban context, in order to allow for the incorporation of people with mental disabilities into the urban economy
and settlement.