Peter Rich, creative African architect

"An artist, a dreamer and a clown" is the title of the first chapter of the book The architecture of Peter Rich, conversations with Africa, by Jonathan Noble.

Peter Rich, a Wits University alumnus, is an artist and dreamer, but if he was a clown at school, he certainly hasn’t been a clown since those schooldays but rather South Africa’s and one of the world’s most respected architects, with dozens of awards and accolades to his name.

“I have been awarded the Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and International Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects for bringing world attention to the genius of Africa, past, present and future, through both my research and practice,” he explains.

His buildings cover the full range - shopping centres, stunning homes, museums and cultural centres, and bush lodges in South Africa and Ethiopia, all sensitive to their environment and with the aim of respecting traditional African space-making norms, using sustainable materials and serving to uplift local communities.

“I have been embraced as a culturally sensitive architect by communities I have worked with,” he explains.

Awards

The awards he has received attest to that: the South Africa Institute of Architects (SAIA) Gold Medal (awarded in 2010), and 16 SAIA Awards of Merit; a fellow of the Sidney Sussex college in Cambridge; and an Honorary Life Member of the Gauteng Institute of Architects.

“He is a brilliant designer and we love the house and would not have it any other way,” says architect Henry Paine, of his Rich-designed home near George, adding, “he is an extraordinary man”.

Rich, a youthful 81-year-old, credits his inspiration and creative spirit to acclaimed Portuguese/Mozambique architect Pancho Guedes, who encouraged Rich’s research into the Ndebele of the highveld.

“Everyone went 300% beyond their known capacities, inspired by this great man, who introduced me to the art and architecture of Africa,” explains Rich. Guedes was described by some as the most creative person they had ever met. He was head of architecture at Wits for 15 years.

“I didn’t go to Rome to study architecture, I went to study it from the Ndebele matriarchs,” he says.

He spent a decade studying them, and completed his master’s thesis on them. “I did seminal research in the 1970s on the Ndebele place-making prior to the smashing of their traditional culture by the iniquities of apartheid.”

Pride of the Ndebele exhibition

Rich curated the Pride of the Ndebele exhibition at the South African National Gallery in 1994, which told the story of the importance of the Ndebele in all their artforms, including their ritual space and how materials are used. “This was the first time their story had been told.”

This exhibition was then taken to New Zealand in 1997, the first exhibition of African art in Oceania. Encouraged by Guedes, Rich learnt the multifaceted skills of being curator, art collector, architect, and artist, “because he believed as a creative being you needed to have multiple layers to what you did, not just focus on one, because the one informed the other,” explains Rich. This is evident in his own home in Parktown, which combines the colours and angular shapes of Ndebele architecture with art and artefacts from around Africa.

Guedes invited Rich to join the Wits architecture department, where Rich taught architecture theory and design for 30 years before leaving to start his own practice. Former students bump into him around Joburg and elsewhere all the time and treat him with reverence. Intern architects approach him to do their inhouse training with him.

Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre

The building that catapulted him onto the world architecture stage was the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre in Limpopo, for which he won the World Building of the Year award in 2009. “I was not known until that happened. That award was seminal,” he says. The building consists of curved timbrel vaults made by locally trained workers from low-grade earth tiles with a hand press. It is a memorial to the 13^th century society that lived around and on top of the Mapungubwe hill, on top of which the gold rhino was found.

That same style of vaults is replicated in the Kigali cricket stadium in Rwanda, and the Earth Pavilion in London, completed in two weeks for then Prince Charles, for which it won the Built Environment category at the 2010 Earth Awards. This led to the construction of hotels and residential buildings in China, an office interior in Chicago, and being appointed as advisor to the city of Kigali.

In 2018 and in 2025 he was invited as the curators’ choice to exhibit 18 enlarged African drawings of his buildings at the Venice Biennale. The same exhibition drawings have been exhibited several times in India.

Three world heritage awards

In Africa he has won three world heritage awards – the thematic master plan for the 3 500-year-old city in northern Tigray in Ethiopia; the Laetoli Footprint Museum and Science Centre in the Ngorogoro Conservancy in Tanzania, a presidential project but a change of presidents meant it wasn’t realised; and the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre in Limpopo. The latter was shortlisted for the prestigious Aga Khan Architecture Award in 2013, while it won "Special Solution with Brick" category at the Wienerberger Brick Award in 2012.

Guedes was an artist and sculptor besides an architect, and art is integral to Rich’s architecture. After visiting a site, he conceptualises the future building in detailed art form before going into this studio to work on the plan of the building.

His favourite building is the Alexandra Heritage Centre in the township north-east of Johannesburg. Here again he engaged the community, and measured the entire heritage precinct. Construction started in 2001 with the Alexandra Renewal Project, but, although complete, due to numerous bureaucratic delays, it is not occupied or used by the community.

His modus operandi was the same as the Ndebele project - go into the community, find out what is important to them, and build a community centre that caters for their needs. Its outstanding features include patterned stained glass windows, mosaic pavements and stone walls.

A new mentor

When Guedes died in 2015 Rich found a new mentor in Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi, winner of the prestigious Pritzker Award, among many other awards. That introduced him to India, where he has served on advisory panels and is now on advisory boards of new schools of architecture in India, in addition to being an international juror for the awards of excellence in China and India.

Rich gives lectures and master classes in India now, and has recently been appointed the lead architect in educational, leisure and hospitality projects there. He is considered a guru among the architectural fraternity in India.

There is another side to Rich – at school he excelled at the 400m metre hurdles, which won him a place in the Transvaal provincial team in 1961, then the South African Senior Athletics Touring Team in 1966. At university his speed qualified him for entry to the Olympics in Tokyo in 1964 and Mexico in 1968 – he was ranked the 6^th fastest hurdler in the world - but he supported the anti-apartheid sports boycott and so didn’t get to test himself on the world’s premium sports stage. “I trained three hours a day, seven days a week for 12 years,” he recalls of his years at high school and Wits. A national hurdles champion five times, he was awarded Springbok colours in 1966, 1968 and 1970.

At 81, he keeps himself fit with daily exercises and walking the 96 stone steps up his lush, terraced garden to relish the view from the top of the Parktown ridge. This keeps him vital, ready to embrace new projects, and nourish his friendships around the world.