Prototyping as Circular Practice

In 2024 Booyens's practice was selected as one of four case studies in a University of Pretoria research report by Celine Nel, examining prototyping as a tool for more circular design in the South African built environment. Drawing on an interview with Booyens and an analysis of the Buffelsdrift work, the study places his hands-on, experimental method within a wider argument about how architects test the appropriateness of an innovation before committing to it — and how that testing, rather than the drawing, becomes the real design work.

The report characterises his approach as craft-mode: a critical engagement with materials, techniques tested on and off site rather than resolved in advance. Grounded in carpentry, welding, brick-laying and earthen construction, Booyens is described as an architect who "advocates embracing calculated risks and using mistakes as learning opportunities" — one who works from a "kit of details," analogue and digital, developed alongside the concept and only then sized to the building, so that the knowledge earned in one project carries into the next.

The Buffelsdrift pump room is read as the central case — a structural and aesthetic prototype at once. Booyens convinced the client to invest in a series of brick vaults built without formwork, cost-effectively and sustainably; the study traces the technique back to the Damaraland Clay Project (2005–06), where clay vaults were built with mud mortar and flat tiles, eliminating any sacrificial support work. Each prototype, built at full 1:1 scale, fed the next, and taught client and labourers alike that the hand-based, formwork-free vault was possible.

The study also records the constraint that shapes the work. Asked about prototyping, Booyens observes: "It's appropriate, but it's not affordable." The tension — shared across the profession — between the value of testing and the cost of it is, in his practice, answered by the accumulation of tacit knowledge: prototypes built slowly over years that eventually make the difficult thing quick.

Nel, C. (2024). A critical analysis of the value of prototyping as part of a circular design process in the South African built environment. Research report, DIT 801, Department of Architecture, University of Pretoria. Supervisor: C. Bothma. Jaco Booyens is discussed as a case study (§4.3.1, pp. 52–55).

Architectural Alchemy

Preface

Jaco Booyens grew up in Constantia Park, Pretoria, next to a veld field pitted with red ant hills. He spent hours excavating them — not to destroy but to study: the architecture of the chambers, the vaulted passages, the ventilation shafts. It was an early encounter with a building system of extraordinary efficiency, produced without drawings, without a client, without a budget, and perfectly adapted to the thermal demands of the Highveld summer.

His stepfather, Professor Niko Sauer, was a mathematician and an obsessive botanist. Sauer's particular passion was lithops — the stone-mimicking succulents of the Karoo desert that survive by being almost invisible: their form an exact response to radiation, water scarcity, and predation pressure. Nothing decorative. Every surface functional. Sauer corresponded with botanists worldwide and eventually wrote the definitive work on the genus. The young Booyens absorbed something from this — not botany, but the discipline of looking very carefully at how living things solve environmental problems.

It would be too neat to say that these early influences explain everything that followed. But they do describe something real: an architect whose instinct is not to impose a form, but to find one that already belongs to the place.

Training & Early Work

Booyens studied architecture at the University of Pretoria, graduating Cum Laude in 1996. He worked briefly in Walvis Bay with Bob Mould Architects — his first sustained exposure to the Namibian desert and the scale of the landscape that would shape so much of his later practice. Then Knysna, then Cape Town.

In 1999 he entered the Project Phoenix design competition alongside Ferdinand Holm and Albrecht Holm. They won it early the following year. The project was never built. He describes this as formative in the way that unbuilt work often is: it clarifies what you believe without the friction of reality forcing compromise.

In 2001 he won the South African Rome Scholarship — one of the most competitive awards in South African architecture at the time. He spent the year in Rome working on two major conceptual projects: the African Trade Mission and the Vertical Village on the River Tiber. Both were concerned with the question of how a contemporary building could belong, materially and climatically, to a place saturated with existing architecture.

Antarctica

Before Rome, or perhaps alongside it in the chronology of formative experiences, there was Antarctica. In 2003 Booyens joined an expedition as part of the ALCI logistics team. He spent weeks in conditions that make every other environment seem temperate. Shelter, in those conditions, is not an architectural question — it is a survival question. The experience clarified something that had been developing for years: buildings exist to mediate between the human body and its climate. Everything else is secondary.

He returned to South Africa with, among other things, a bakkie that smelled permanently of seal oil. The smell eventually faded. The clarity about what buildings are for did not.

Rome & the City as Nature

The Rome Scholarship work is unusual in the canon of South African architectural scholarship. Where most scholars produce drawings of buildings in an Italian idiom — or drawings of South African buildings informed by Italian space — Booyens went somewhere else entirely. He was interested in Rome not as a repository of architectural precedent but as a natural system: a city that had metabolised several thousand years of human occupation and emerged with its essential structure intact.

The Pantheon, studied at length, demonstrated that a building could outlast every intention imposed on it if its material and structural logic were sound enough. The Colosseum, similarly, was not an archaeological relic but a functioning piece of urban infrastructure — its form generating activity by its presence alone, independent of programme.

Professor Alberto Alessi, who supervised the Rome scholarship work, wrote of it: "Jaco Booyens turns his attention away from the mythical and museum role of the city and sees it as a purely natural place… Architecture is the result of a series of careful considerations regarding a self-sustainable use of energy, the efficient functioning of the natural systems of energy supply, the implications of low-impact technology on the environment. Involuntarily and paradoxically, this creates an object with a powerful visual impact."

Rysmierberg

On returning to South Africa, Booyens began the project that would define the central decade of his practice: Rysmierberg, a farm in the Klein Karoo that he designed and built himself, largely alone, over seven years. He joined DHK Architects in Cape Town briefly before establishing independent practice, and then committed to the farm as a full-scale experiment.

The project is almost impossible to categorise. It is simultaneously a residence, a construction site, a technical laboratory, and an argument. The walls are poured earth and adobe. The roof tilts to catch both light and prevailing weather. Energy comes from a hybrid solar and wind system designed from first principles. Water comes from a borehole, lifted by a combination of solar pump and ram pump — the ram pump being a nineteenth-century technology that uses the energy of moving water to lift a smaller volume of water to a greater height, with no external power source.

Booyens built the ram pump himself. He also built the furniture. He machined parts on a lathe. He welded the metalwork. The construction took seven years and the accumulated knowledge from those seven years — of material behaviour, of thermal performance, of what a body actually needs to be comfortable in a hot semi-arid climate — is the real output of the project. The building is the record of the research.

Damaraland

In 2005, while Rysmierberg was still in construction, Booyens took on the Damaraland Clay Project in the Ugab River valley in Namibia, working simultaneously as architect and contractor. The site is remote enough that every material decision is also a logistical decision. He built with the clay of the riverbed. The landscape is not a backdrop — it is the source material. The building emerged from the ground it stands on, in the most literal sense.

Buffelsdrift

Between 2017 and 2020, Booyens led the restoration of the Buffelsdrift farmstead in Ladismith — a nineteenth-century Karoo farmstead comprising a cluster of outbuildings, stables, and a principal dwelling that had fallen into serious disrepair over several decades.

The restoration is not a stylistic exercise. Booyens is not interested in vernacular architecture as an aesthetic reference — he is interested in it as an engineering record. The thick adobe walls at Buffelsdrift do not look like nineteenth-century Karoo walls; they are nineteenth-century Karoo walls, or as close to them as the available materials and techniques allow. They work for the same reason the originals worked: their mass carries the day's heat into the cold of the night, so the building holds its own temperature without machinery.

The project won the Gold Medal at the Domus International Restoration Awards in 2020 and an Award of Merit from the South African Institute of Architects in 2022. The jury citations recognised what Booyens himself would describe as the central ambition of the project: not to produce a sanitised facsimile of the original, but to recover the material logic that had kept it standing.

House Yzerfontein

The most recent completed project, House Yzerfontein (2022–2024), appears at first to be a departure. The roof is concrete, not earth. The geometry was generated in Rhino and Grasshopper — parametric software that produces forms no draughtsman could describe by hand. The entrance door is 10mm mild steel, laser-cut in a pattern derived from the same parametric logic as the roof vault.

But look again. Two flat concrete planes at different gradients, connected by a freeform vaulted shell supported on tapered columns: this is the same problem Booyens has been working on for thirty years, restated in a new material. How do you use structural geometry to shelter a space efficiently, with the minimum material, in a way that responds to climate rather than ignoring it?

The early design iterations explored a honeycomb plywood structure — STP files generated in Rhino and Grasshopper for 5-axis CNC cutting in 18mm plywood. The fabrication cost was prohibitive. But the understanding of freeform geometry and structural optimisation that came from those iterations shaped every decision that followed.

The form is determined by structural logic and climate response. Beauty, as with the earth buildings, is the ineluctable result.

The Practice

Booyens runs a small independent practice from the Western Cape. The work ranges across scales and materials — earth buildings, concrete structures, restoration projects, conceptual work — but the underlying question remains consistent: how much can be done with how little? The least material to enclose the most space. The simplest system to maintain the most comfortable interior. The minimum intervention to achieve the maximum adaptation to climate.

This is not an aesthetic position. It is a practical and ecological one. A building that cannot sustain itself — that depends entirely on imported energy and materials — is a building poorly suited to its place. Booyens has spent three decades finding out what buildings suited to their place look like, and building them.

Strangers at Home

The three architects whose work is presented here — Jaco Booyens, Christo de Beer, and Adriaan Laubscher — were South African Rome Scholars in residence during 2001. What follows is an account of the intellectual and architectural enquiry that their year in Rome produced.

The City as Natural System

Rome is not a neutral setting for architectural study. It is perhaps the most burdened architectural environment in the world: two and a half thousand years of accumulated form, meaning, and mythological weight. The risk for any architect working here is that the city becomes a museum — a place to study what has already been decided, rather than a place in which to think.

Jaco Booyens approached the problem differently. He turned his attention away from the mythical and museum role of the city and saw it as a purely natural place — subject to the same constraints of energy, material, and climate as any site in the Karoo or the Namibian desert. Architecture, in this reading, is not a cultural act performed against a backdrop of history. It is the result of a series of careful considerations regarding the self-sustainable use of energy, the efficient functioning of natural systems of energy supply, and the implications of low-impact technology on the environment.

Involuntarily and paradoxically, this creates an object with a powerful visual impact.

The African Trade Mission

The first project, the African Trade Mission in Rome, takes a site within the existing urban fabric and proposes a building that must belong to that fabric without mimicking it. The programme is contemporary — a trade and cultural mission facility — but the material logic is rooted in climate response and structural efficiency rather than stylistic reference.

The project demonstrates Booyens's consistent interest in buildings that generate their form from environmental conditions rather than from architectural precedent. The result is a building that is clearly of its time and place while remaining independent of the historical language that surrounds it.

The Vertical Village on the River Tiber

The second project, the Vertical Village on the River Tiber, is more extreme in its proposition. It imagines a dense vertical settlement on the banks of the Tiber — a city within the city, designed according to principles of climatic self-sufficiency and structural economy. The river provides the water supply; the orientation of the structure manages solar gain; the density creates the thermal mass that stabilises interior temperatures.

The project is concerned with the idea that density and sustainability are not in opposition — that a building can be simultaneously dense, efficient, and climatically responsive. The Vertical Village proposes a form of urban habitation that takes the constraints of energy and material as its generative logic rather than as problems to be overcome by technology.

What Remains

The work produced by these three scholars during their year in Rome is notable for its refusal of the obvious. Rome offers an almost unlimited supply of architectural references — formal, material, historical, urban. The temptation to quote from this supply, to absorb its languages and reproduce them in new combinations, is understandable and has produced a great deal of competent architecture.

What is rarer, and more interesting, is the decision to treat Rome as a problem rather than a solution: to ask what architecture must do in this place, for this climate, with these materials, for these people — and to answer that question from first principles rather than from the archive.

Jaco Booyens, in particular, demonstrates an architectural intelligence that is oriented outward rather than inward — toward the physical reality of sites, climates, and materials rather than toward the internal conversations of the discipline. This is unusual, and it is generative. The buildings that result from this orientation are not buildings that look like other buildings. They look like the places they are in.

© Prof Alberto Alessi, Università degli Studi di Roma. Published with permission.