Durban Cascoland 08

The Umthombo drop-in centre in Durban, South Africa, provides a day-care service for 50 of the city’s 3000 street children. However, the centre is unable to offer overnight accommodation and had limited recreational facilities and no place for the children to store their belongings. Jair Straschnow and Gitte Nygaard stayed at the centre for several weeks and designed several practical solutions for these problems. They designed tables and benches for playing games, drawing and writing in order to create a space for personal expression. The Postbox Lockers provide the children with storage for their belongings but they also provide a symbolic ‘identity’ or ‘address’ for these dispossessed children. In this way Straschnow and Nygaard draw attention to these children’s unfortunate situation.

Gitte Nygaard (1970) studied jewellery design in Denmark and then continued her studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In addition to jewellery she designs installations, sculptures and furniture. Nygaard is fascinated by the intimacy and also the public nature of jewellery. She believes that this combination can make jewellery into a social instrument. Her work encourages us to think about traditions and collective conventions. Collaborating with designers from other disciplines helps to change her approach to her own work.

Jair Straschnow (1965) is a Dutch-Israeli furniture designer. He is highly critical of the objects that he contributes to our living environment. The scarcity of natural materials requires careful consideration of their use. He attempts to minimise his design’s footprint by creating minimal forms with multiple uses, such as an armchair that can be easily transformed into a dining chair, the use of non-composite materials and reducing wastage in the production process.
They teamed up to participate in Cascoland, an international collaborative project for artists and designers in public spaces in Durban. The remit was to involve local residents and those who use public spaces to explore new ways of experiencing the public realm.