Ms Bonolo Masango

Lecturer
Name: Bonolo Masango
Location: LG022 FADA Building Bunting Road Campus
FADA Architecture Staff  Staff Members

Contact Details:
Tel: 011 559 1103

Email: bmasango@uj.ac.za

About Ms Bonolo Masango

I have always been drawn to stories that live between walls, beneath foundations and in our indigenous landscapes. From 2022 to 2024, I co-led “Unit 15x” at the graduate school of Architecture (GSA), a masters design studio that allowed me to work with students in exploring ideas of justice, memory and land. Our research was grounded in the rituals and cultures of indigenous African life, and the silences of post-colonial cities.

I completed my professional architecture master’s degree at the GSA in the University of Johannesburg. My thesis asked questions about storytelling in architecture – whose stories we tell, and who gets to speak. This curiosity followed me into the world of practice where I worked at MMA Design Studio, where I had the honour of curating the “Origins” exhibition on behalf of MMA at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. This exhibition deepened on my explorations into land, ritual and belonging as themes in architectural design.

In 2025, I was invited by Cave Bureau to contribute to the British Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale in the “Brick Room: Rift valley Intersect”. My submission, “Brick by Brick: a story of memory and resilience”, traced the material history of the South African brick. From the enforced uniformity of apartheid housing to the sprawling self-built homes rising across rural homelands. These bricks, shaped by hand and fire, are evidence of another kind of architecture, one that insists on dignity, memory and reparation.

Now, I find myself between roles: educator, practitioner and soon, researcher again. I’m preparing for a PhD that will allow me to dwell longer in spaces where ritual, land and material come together, and slowly I’m beginning to shape my own small practice rooted in care, memory and the belief that architecture is not only about building but about remembering.