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11 May 2023 | Story Samkelo Fetile | Photo iFlair Photography
Modular Lecture Building
The Modular Lecture Building on the UFS’s Bloemfontein Campus.

The University of the Free State’s (UFS) Modular Lecture Building on its Bloemfontein Campus recently received a National Merit Award from the South African Institute of Architects (SAIA). The awards were announced at the 2021/2022 Corobrik SAIA Awards of Merit and Awards for Excellence ceremony in Johannesburg.

The multi-functional Modular Lecture Building, considered a hub for innovative learning, was designed by Roodt Architects in partnership with GXY Architects.

The adjudication panel received a total of 42 architectural projects from around the country, including infrastructure developments in the public and private sector. The SAIA Awards programme is structured over a two-year period and is conducted in two stages. In stage one regional awards for architecture are presented by the nine regional institutes affiliated to SAIA. In stage two the winning regional projects that are consequently entered into the national awards receive either a Commendation, an Award of Merit, and/or an Award for Excellence, which recognises exceptional achievement in the field of architecture.

In their citation the adjudicators noted that the Modular Lecture Building sets a benchmark for rational planning and technical efficiency and helps complete the campus urban framework through its placing and material choices.

Multi-functional spaces for students

Nico Janse van Rensburg, Senior Director at UFS University Estates, said the recognition is a testament to the UFS’s aspirations to renew, rejuvenate, regenerate, and revisit facilities and infrastructure.

“This award proves that excellence can be achieved with a reasonable set budget,” Janse van Rensburg said. “Energy efficiency and green building principles can be achieved by careful planning and teamwork.”

The Modular Lecture Building offers a variety of much-needed flexible teaching and learning spaces. “I have been using the facilities in this building for two years now, and I can say the building is much more spacious and conducive to studying,” said Hymne Spies, a third-year BSc student majoring in biochemistry and genetics. “The many plugs make it more efficient for studying, as one can plug in his or her laptop. There is also a nice computer lab for us to make use of.”

The UFS is proud that the construction of this facility forms part of a bigger endeavour – to create a cohesive campus identity that improves core business and to further extend its innovation and excellence as per its Vision 130.

Take a tour of the new Modular Lecturing Space and Assessment Centre Building:

News Archive

Mellon Foundation awards R10 million research grant to Trauma, Forgiveness and Reconciliation Studies
2015-02-20

Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Senior Research Professor in Trauma, Forgiveness and Reconciliation Studies, and Dr Saleem Badat, Programme Director at the Mellon Foundation.
Photo: Johan Roux

Through her profound insight, vast experience, and unfaltering belief in humanity, Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, has secured a R10 million grant from one of the world’s most prestigious foundations funding human sciences research.

“This is one of the biggest grants that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded to a university”, said Dr Saleem Badat, Program Director: International Higher Education and Strategic Projects at the Mellon Foundation. Prof Badat attended the press event that took place on 16 February 2015 on our Bloemfontein Campus.

UFS Trauma, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation Studies, spearheaded by Prof Gobodo-Madikizela, will manage the research project.

Prof Jonathan Jansen, Vice-Chancellor and Rector of the UFS, expressed great excitement “about this particular grant and the subject on which it focuses is so incredibly timely and germane to our own situation.”

Trauma, Memory and Representations of the Past: Transforming Scholarship in the Humanities and Arts

This new-found partnership between the Mellon Foundation and the UFS will enable a five-year research programme. The focus area of this initiative will be ‘Trauma, Memory and Representations of the Past: Transforming Scholarship in the Humanities and Arts’.

The research will pivot specifically around the question of how trauma is transmitted from one generation to the next. “South Africa lends itself to these questions,” Prof Gobodo-Madikizela said, “because we are now dealing with a generation of young people who were born after the traumas of the past.” These past experiences, though, are “passed on to the younger generation and become their own stories and narratives as if they themselves experienced the traumas directly.”

“This is an investment in how we can in fact create a different kind of community,” Prof Jansen said, “in which we eventually recognise each other – not by the accident of our skin, but by that elusive sense of a common humanity.”

Arts and theatre

Other aspects critical to this study are the inclusion of the arts and theatre. Many people have great difficulty in expressing their experiences of trauma in the spoken word. The arts and theatre provide an ideal platform to engage the public and stimulate conversation. As an example of the power these platforms possess, Prof Gobodo-Madikizela highlighted the success of the Johannes Stegmann Art Gallery – situated on the Bloemfontein Campus and curated by Angela de Jesus – in engaging the public in very productive ways.

Participants

Some of the artists, directors and scholars who will join in this project include:

• Lara Foot-Newton, Director/Playwright
• Sue Williamson, Activist Artist
• Angela de Jesus, Visual Artist/Curator
• Dr Buhle Zuma, Social Psychology Research
• Dr Shose Khessi, Social Psychology Research
• Prof Tamara Shefer, Women’s and Gender Studies
• Prof Kopano Ratele, Gender/Men and Masculinities
• Prof Jan Coetzee, Sociology of Developing Societies
• Prof Helene Strauss, Literary and Cultural Studies

New intellectual frontiers

“There is an aspiration in this proposal,” Dr Saleem Badat said. “We were born through this pain of colonialism and apartheid; we even went through the TRC. Our scholars in this country, our universities, should be at the forefront of this research. This is not research we can leave to the institutions in the north.”

Prof Gobodo-Madikizela agreed. “The overarching theme of this work is new knowledge production, focusing on the experiences in South Africa as experiences that can teach us something new.”

This will serve not only South Africa, but can also establish support for, and inform, countries facing similar dilemmas. In fact, “any part of the world in which genocide and murder and racism remains as legacies from the past,” Dr Badat said.

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