A Social Beacon Ablaze

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Local Studio’s Visionary Curiosity Shines a New Light on Eldorado Park with Lantern House

Once known as Sub-City, Lantern House is a homage to the curiosity about an old sub-station in Eldorado Park that burned within the Local Studio team. A fascinating factor of the local built environment, abandoned electrical sub-stations are scattered around apartheid-era buffer zones in South Africa; relics of an era of selective electrification. To bring these spaces into a new era, Local Studio asked: what if these structures could shift from a past role as electrical transformers, to a new role as social transformers?

Out of the ashes
The project began as a proposal of an urban acupuncture initiative across from a social housing community in Eldorado Park, a suburb of Soweto. Local Studio envisioned a new library and community hub, which they dubbed ‘Lantern House’, and which could refocus a light on a forgotten corner of a forgotten neighborhood.

At 34 m², the original substation was too small for a wide and welcoming community, but thanks to the implementation of mass timber, expansion of the footprint became possible as the space could grow arboreally out of the original brick structure. As such, Lantern House reaches upwards to three storeys, with a roof terrace offering a new perspective over Soweto.

4 Lantern House
7 Lantern House
6 Lantern House

A social transformer
Although towering at a bird’s-eye view, up-close, Lantern House becomes the social transformer in a newly-programmed community plaza. The space connects the social housing community to one another, as well as to the broader context. At ground level, a flexible maker’s space spills into a new amphitheatre that can seat 65 people, while on the first floor, one wall of the digital learning wing is an outward facing projection screen, animating the park beyond. Going significantly beyond just collective entertainment and interaction, the space also houses a counselling room.

Through ensuring that the new infrastructure does not burden the community into which it is punctured, Lantern House places its influence on the surrounding context as priority. By exploring the potential of superfluous space within Sub-City, Local Studio were able to transform theory into reality. In its built form, this project embodies not only the needs of the community it is built within, but also the need for our cities to hand over the excess and allow it to be transformed.

This article is an extract from our 2024/25 Coffee Table Edition. Click here to read the full issue.

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