Intuition, Risk and Representing the Global South

What if the wind could draw? What if cities de-centralized infrastructure?

In January 2024, Daniel embarks on the Master’s in Sustainable Cities at Norman Foster’s newly established education institution in Madrid. Just two days after he submitted his CV, Daniel was accepted, leading him to take an unintended change of trajectory. His connection to the Norman Foster Foundation started in 2017 when he attended the Digital X workshop led by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, while he was an Honours year student at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

As a South African architect, Daniel articulates the responsibility he feels towards the Global South. In 2022, he directed ‘The Art of Mobility’, a speculative design reimagining the future of safe, flexible urban mobility in African cities. The project was featured in Norman Foster’s Motion exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.  

Daniel Xu spoke to writer and researcher Sameeah Ahmed-Arai about his most experimental projects, from recording the wind ‘draw’ to journeying through Cape Town’s abandoned tunnels.

SAA: The MSc is the third endeavor you’ll be taking on with Norman Foster’s enterprise. Let’s go back to the beginning – the Digital X workshop.

DX: I used part of my Honours project ‘Landscape Rejuvenation Machines’ which was not a building. It was a collection of landscape totems along Devil’s Peak which were designed to burn as part of the life cycle of Fynbos – specifically proteas – to rejuvenate the landscape. There are often fires on the mountain that can be devastating. The totems allow for these in a controlled way and use the fire as a catalyst to create a connection between city and mountain. I framed the project through a website that was a spin off from their website, ‘anticipatingtheFuture.com’. My submission was ‘rejuvenatingthefuture.com’.

SAA: Your pursuit at the Norman Foster Institute is the first break in a five-year journey with Stewart and Partners. Which skills or qualities would you attribute to being able to come this far? You became the youngest director when you were only 28 years old.

DX: Anyone in architecture or built environment needs resilience but a large part that has contributed to my success is the people. There are key players in my life that have contributed to my success, Alex Stewart being one of them, Phillipa Tumubweinee at UCT, Phillipe Fouche from SAOTA. They have been mentors in my life that I have been able to rely on in a multitude of ways.

SAA: You came top of your class in Honours and Master’s. I’m sure you had several options after graduation. What was special about Stewart and Partners?

DX: Part of being an architect is that you see your ideas come to life and materialize. This was the appeal of working in a smaller practice: having more impact and on-site experience. Alex is also an incredible person – very down to earth and caring. It was the balance of the opportunity and what the practice is doing – it has a unique portfolio from residential to water infrastructure and digital design. Often practices are boxed into a defined scope of work. Whereas here, you’re pushed to have a problem-solving approach.

SAA: What is the environment like at this kind of international workshop?

DX: At the Digital X Workshop, I was the only one from the Global South and from Africa. It was interesting trying to navigate that identity being African. I had an internal sense of responsibility to represent the Global South. And so, part of the conversation went towards informal settlements and things like that. One of the concepts that came out of it was the idea of a city without infrastructure. There was this notion of decentralizing infrastructure and asking what the possibilities are with the current climate crisis and for informal settlements. We can create self-sustaining decentralized hubs of water, power and different things. If that is the concept carried forward into the way we make cities there’s the potential for the third world to leap from the first world.

SAA: Linked to that is the question of location. You’ve been working on projects in Spain at Stewart and Partners, and other locations at SAOTA, what has that been like for you in terms of context and moving between continents, sites, locations?

DX: It goes back to what I touched on earlier: developing a robust inquiry or research process to then come to a design conclusion or proposal. I hate the idea of relying on a repertoire of things and then regurgitating those things out. The fascination with working in different contexts is that you can come in completely blind. You must be thorough and look into ‘how do people build that side’ and spatial and cultural norms. Something as simple as ergonomics: bathrooms are laid out differently in different contexts.

A large part is also intuitive. One of the interesting things I’ve realized is that people are people. That’s what’s been amazing in the last five is years is to get experience of how spaces are planned and to see them come to life. You realise, ‘This is what I could’ve done better’ or ‘This is what was really successful’.

SAA: The balance between research and intuition?

DX: Yes.

SAA: What advice do you have for someone wanting to do well in this field?

DX: Work hard but it’s okay to go with the flow sometimes. Trust your gut. If you trust yourself, it will work out in the end. What’s led me to where I am now is that I have not pre-meditated that much: the balance of being resilient, hardworking but also being able to go with the flow and be open to wherever opportunities take you. I wouldn’t have been able to engage with these projects if I had a tunnel vision and one end goal. The way I landed up at SAOTA is that I was driving the examiners around as a shuttle guy. I met Phillipe, the director as SAOTA, and we got chatting. He was like, ‘We’re doing some cool work, do you want to come and intern in your second year?’ From that, I got the opportunity to do holiday work and my internship before continuing postgraduate studies there.

SAA: I think that goes back to what you were saying about intuition and not being so rigid.

DX: And taking risks. For the Digital X competition for example, there was only a week to do the entry and it was also the week of my final building technology module design submission. A lot of people from our year didn’t enter because of that. I spent a lot of time on the Digital X application and if I hadn’t it would’ve been a very different trajectory.

SAA: That one opportunity has been a catalyst for so many others.

DX: Absolutely. It’s weird to think that week in Honours was more impactful that a lot of other things. Take risks.

SAA: You’ve also taught at both architecture schools in Cape Town, School of Explorative Architecture and University of Cape Town. Your experience in pedagogy is something I wanted to ask you about. 

DX: I don’t come with agenda. It’s difficult to design a system or way of teaching that is universal. It’s a tough challenge. I try to engage with what the students bring to the table. It’s a skill I can bring into practice – engaging with engineers or our team here. To really investigate what people are curious about and take it to the next level to see what the potential of that project or idea is.

SAA: And with clients too.

DX: Absolutely.

SAA: What are you currently interested in in the architecture field and where would you like to intervene? 

DX: I’m interested in technology – 3D modelling, Python programming – to change the way we offer our service and grapple with how we communicate visually.

SAA: What is your preferred means of visual communication?

DX: Collage. Being really informed but also using your intuition, that has been my approach. It’s a conceptual abstract means, a group of images or ideas. It’s not a text that demands ‘this is what I’m saying’. The viewer can apply their own interpretation.

SAA: What kind of collages?

The presentation starts with an investigation of Daniel’s heritage: his great-great grandfather was an artist in Shanghai. “This is a photo of him and Einstein,” Daniel says. The collages that follow – abstract and explorative – experiment with hydroponic installations and a machine garden for climate resilience, as he envisions a new form of symbiosis between the natural and artificial. Explaining that Cape Town is usually acknowledged for its oceans, mountains, skies but not the earth below us, he ventured into Cape Town’s forgotten tunnels: closed off after the bubonic plague, millions of litres of water pass through in its travel from mountain to ocean. The tunnels, like other forgotten earthly structures, are abandoned yet hold a latent potential. Even the forgotten may give us clues for the future.