Dreaming with new tools

1 October 2025 - Tamsin Mackay

Artificial Intelligence is inspiring African architects to build, create and explore with traditional knowledge that spans generations.

A quiet revolution is unfolding in the Wits School of Architecture and Planning. Here, new questions are being asked in a space that has been shaped by architects like Pancho Guedes and Peter Rich – whose interrogations of why African architecture and buildings look like European imitations have been answered with clay, memory, ritual and code.

Undertaken by Dr Sechaba Maape, an architect, academic and the Director of Afreetekture, the research is rooted at the intersection of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). Blending the history and knowledge of indigenous Africa with futuristic tools, he is reimagining what architecture once was before concrete and colonialism took over and what it could be again.

“We have been collectively conditioned,” says Maape. “Architectural schools here still teach about hearths and insulation – concepts born from cold countries, not from a place where the sun is warm even in winter. The challenge is to find a way of translating African ideas, philosophies, theories, principles and concepts into modern architecture.”

However, this is not simply a matter of creating round forms or using bright colours. “When you think critically, you realise that this does not get to the heart of African architectural concepts and potential.”

Out in Africa

Maape’s approach started with stories. Using rituals, oral histories, sketching and clay-sculpting, his work traces design back to its oldest African roots. In his view, indigenous architecture is about thresholds, movement, adaptation and living outside.

“In the past, buildings were not what held life together – it was ritual and flow,” he explains. Architecture was light and mobile, rooted in ecology and ceremony and not in the separation from them.”

When Maape speaks of the land, he uses the term ‘tropical ontology’, a reminder that climate shapes culture. In warmer zones, where survival does not require confinement, people build differently and homes are thresholds, not containers. Life happens outside.

Designing for the future when the tools lie in the past is complex. Enter AI, which Maape is using as a cultural collaborator. The technology is helping to visualise architectural ideas that are otherwise impossible to iterate using traditional software.

Ancestors outdoors

“AI is helping us answer the question: what else could we become?” says Maape. “Generative AI takes a Ndebele homestead, for example, and reimagines it for the modern city, showing what might happen if urban design was based on local, indigenous knowledge. AI is allowing for an expedited process of iteration and experimentation. I say, if you have a machine that costs billions, use it to solve some of the most problematic issues in society and I am using it to break away from the mental and intellectual lock-ins we have here in South Africa.”

At Brebnor House, a Wits-owned property for architectural experimentation, Maape recently undertook a project with students using AI and other tools to rethink structures and buildings that had a very thin mediation between them and the outside world – a thin line between indoors and outdoors that blends the two organically.

“It is opposite to what we have been taught, that architecture itself is this thing separating us, rather than connecting us, to the outside world,” says Maape. “We have a culture that embraces the outdoors and AI is giving us the freedom to explore the development of spaces that speak to ancestral logics of openness and adaptation.”

A city reimagined

When Maape presented these imagined futures and designs at an exhibition, attendees were stunned. “They did not realise that our City could look like this,” he says. Suddenly it was possible to visualise a future that did not mimic the past.

Afreetekture is a reframing of modernity, asking architects to stop mistaking permanence for value, and insulation for comfort, and instead to reorient design around life. AI and indigenous knowledge systems are giving African architects permission to dream with their own tools.

“We are not trying to go back,” Maape says. “We are trying to remember forward.”

• Tamsin Mackay is a freelance writer.
• This article first appeared in?Curiosity,?a research magazine produced by?Wits Communications?and the?Research Office.
• Read more in the 19^th issue, themed #Disruption, which explores the crises, tech, research, and people shaking up our world in 2025.