Arch for Arch

The Tutu Legacy Foundation wanted something that was not a statue. Desmond Tutu had been explicit in life that he did not want a bronze figure on a plinth; he wanted something people could walk through, sit under, argue beneath. The brief that came to us was a single sentence: a place that belongs to everyone, in the middle of the city, that says something about the Constitution he helped make possible.

Snøhetta brought the structural concept — an interlaced timber arch, fourteen laminated beams crossing to form a domed lattice, each beam standing for a chapter of the Constitution. Our job, as the local studio, was to make it real on a specific corner of a specific city with a specific set of rules.

We treated the archaeological assessment as a box to tick, and it nearly sank the project. When the trench exposed unmapped footings — later confirmed as part of an early-colonial structure near the slave lodge grid — we had no budget line, no protocol, and no relationship with the heritage archaeologists we suddenly needed. We built those relationships under maximum pressure, which is the worst time to build anything.

We also underestimated how many separate authorities own a single pavement: the City, the provincial heritage body, the cathedral's trust, and a transport servitude. Each had veto power and none of them talked to each other. We became the switchboard, which was not in anyone's fee.