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Christina Zhang: BEYOND THE WALL is a school-supermarket situated on top of a wall that divides up a high-end residential compound and an informal township in Cape Town, South Africa. The two programs are packed into a scaffolding set up along the wall, with a communal courtyard in the center. Without ever actually touching the existing wall, this building dissolves the division by bringing the outlines of houses to the other façade, reminding each community of what’s beyond the wall that divides them.
Together, the iconographic facades, the communal courtyard and the physical action of crossing the wall itself hope to convey one message - Even with the wall, the institutional or municipal framework, people could find their own paths to move around it, occupy it, trespass it, and find a shared space over it.
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