
The Design of a Museum for Colonial Artefacts in Central, Gqeberha

Skye O’Connor
Nelson Mandela University
Colonial statues, facades, and institutional architecture remain firmly present in the city, while the histories they impose, and the lives they have displaced, linger in absence. These objects do not simply recall the past; they continue to argue for it.
From this tension emerges a design for colonial artefacts that refuses neutrality, celebration, and closure. Rather than erasing these contested forms, or allowing them to dominate civic spaces unchallenged, the project relocates them into a deliberately confrontational architectural condition, one that exposes their ideological weight and historical violence.
An architectural non-object that privileges memory over form, experience over enclosure, and critical encounter over resolution. It does not seek reconciliation through form but reckoning through space.









