Their project focused on the extension of MYDO 2, a vital youth hub in the Melusi informal settlement. Through a co-design process, students and community members worked side by side to conceptualise and deliver a 35 m² timber-frame extension. The intervention responds directly to community priorities, providing adaptable learning, gathering, and creative spaces.

The project demonstrates how timber can serve both as a sustainable, low-carbon building system and as a medium for social impact. Locally grounded and collaboratively built, the MYDO 2 extension embodies architecture as a platform for participation, empowerment, and resilience.

The team’s narrative was guided by the metaphor of the eagle: observing, listening, taking flight, and returning. This reflects their journey of co-design, from listening and mapping to building together and ultimately returning with a shared sense of authorship.

Congratulations to the team and the Melusi community for showing how design, when done with and not for, can create more than buildings: it creates relationships, agency, and future possibilities.

Thank you to the project funders Department of Science, Technology and Innovation, The National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF) andSouth African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement (NRF SAASTA) and to York Timbers, RAW Modular and Woodoc for your support