Creative Cape Town

The Creative Clusters Breakfasts at Bird Café are a unique opportunity for creatives and especially design practitioners to meet in an intimate and relaxed environment for networking and information sharing. The idea is to invite people from at least two to four creative companies and give them the space to network with other creatives from divergent sectors.

In March the Creative Cape Town team including Zayd Minty and Stuart Denoon (ECDI research assistant) met two design schools in the central city – SAE Institute who train in sound, animation, film and multimedia and Ruth Prowse School of Art who are a traditional private arts school who have existed since 1970. Sadly three other schools who were meant to attend cancelled on the day because they missed a very interesting discussion where everything from pricing of schools, to understanding the competition to the difficulties of registering with the WCED was raised. The two schools shared their biggest challenge as being marketing themselves, dealing with growth and visioning (amongst others) and welcomed opportunities like this to learn from each other. It was interesting that to attend private design/art schools are not cheap (between R30 -40 000 a year) and that increasingly a growing market is other African countries.

In April Zayd Minty and the newly appointed Lorelle Bell, of Cape Town for World Design Capital 2014 met architects. The architects who attended were Gita Goven and Alastair Rendall of ARG Design, Malcolm Campbell of ACG and Simone Le Grange, currently in academia as an Academic Development Lecturer at the University of Cape Town.

ARG Design are a multi disciplinary practices currently involved in the upgrade of the Grand Parade and the IRT bus stations. ACG Architects area black company who have worked on a number of key commissions for institutional buildings and housing. They have also worked on the Trojan Horse and the Langa Memorials . Both companies have a strong focus on socially conscious and sustainable design and have been pioneers in many respects. Simone spoke of her interest in working with arts and culture organisations in and around the city and this was an interesting common point for all the architects who are increasingly persuading their public sector clients to incorporate art into their architecture.

Another talking point was the need for architects to become more involved in the project management on public sector developments, particularly to ensure that sustainable design interventions are implemented in developments.