FRAGILE TERRAINS / Olifantsfontein, South Africa — Architects Without Borders, London – Winner of the International Competition

Fragile Terrains explores how architecture can hold and sustain vulnerable ecologies — both human and environmental. The project proposes a community of clustered cottages for AIDS orphans on a ten-hectare site near Johannesburg, using everyday and recycled materials to build a porous, adaptive settlement.

Fifty small pavilions form a dispersed landscape of care, organized around collective spaces for cooking, learning, and gathering. Architecture here operates less as an object than as a soft infrastructure: it supports daily rituals, builds metabolic cycles with the surrounding environment, and holds fragile lives within shared ground.

The project emerges from the tension between scarcity and collective imagination, between the vulnerability of the terrain and the capacity to inhabit it with dignity and intelligence.