Chronicling the trajectory of an architect craving recognition, The Masterplan unfolds as a fictional reconstruction of an architectural dream blown to dust by bigger forces. When asked to design the capital of a young African republic, Rodrigo Tomás sees the opportunity of a lifetime. Eager to outshine his famous father he accepts, but he soon discovers that not all is what it seems… The story of his involvement comes to reveal a larger story – of an emerging nation’s struggle with colonial residue, the growing Chinese influence in Africa and the fraught workings of a global real estate market.
About the speakers
Reinier de Graaf is a Dutch architect and writer. He is a partner in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), where he leads projects in Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Reinier is the co-founder of OMA’s think-tank AMO and Sir Arthur Marshall Visiting Professor of Urban Design at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession and the recently published novel The Masterplan.
Architect Daan Roggeveen is the founder of MORE Architecture, an agency for research and architecture with offices in Amsterdam and Shanghai. With journalist Michiel Hulshof, he published the acclaimed ‘How the City Moved to Mr Sun – China’s New Megacities‘, and studied the Chinese impact on urbanization in Africa. Recently the duo published ‘The Amsterdam Agenda – 12 Good Ideas for the Future of Cities‘.
Anawana Haloba lives and works in Oslo and Livingstone. She is educated at the Evelyn Hone College of Applied Arts inLusaka, Zambia. Anawana Haloba’s artistic practice is an ongoing investigation process into positions of different societies within varied political, social, economic and cultural contexts, ideological and post-independence frameworks. Her artistic practice is symbiotically linked to and through her preparatory exercise in drafting poetry in the forms of sketches from which the artist abstracts to performative based artworks within moving image, installation, and sound, while creating situations where the material culture of any given place can be probed and reconsidered within the scheme of rapidly shifting contemporary subjectivities.
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