Architect

Jaco Booyens

Jaco Booyens grew up in Constantia Park, Pretoria, in a house next to a field of red ant hills. He spent hours excavating them — not to destroy, but to understand: the architecture of the chambers, the logic of ventilation, the structural economy of the vaulted passages. It was his first encounter with a building system that was perfectly adapted to its climate with zero imported technology.

His stepfather, Professor Niko Sauer, was a mathematician and botanist with a special obsession: lithops, the stone-mimicking succulents of the Karoo desert. Sauer collected them, corresponded with botanists worldwide, wrote the definitive work on the genus. The young Booyens absorbed something from this — not botany exactly, but the habit of looking very carefully at how living things solve environmental problems. The lithops survives by being almost invisible, its form an exact response to solar radiation, water scarcity, and predation pressure. No part of it is decorative.

After graduating Cum Laude in architecture from the University of Pretoria in 1996, Booyens worked in Walvis Bay, Namibia, with Bob Mould Architects — drawing him into the desert landscapes that would define much of his later practice. Then Knysna, then a detour that would shape everything: in 2003, he joined an Antarctic expedition as part of the ALCI logistics team. He spent weeks in the ice, living inside one of the most extreme environments on earth, thinking about shelter in its most absolute sense.

He returned with a seal-oil-stained bakkie and a head full of ideas about insulation, thermal mass, and what buildings actually need to do in the absence of any infrastructure. The bakkie became legendary. The ideas became buildings.

Rome

In 2001, Booyens won the South African Rome Scholarship. The year in Rome deepened something that had already begun in the Antarctic and the Namibian desert: an understanding of buildings as material objects that outlast every intention imposed on them. The Pantheon and the Colosseum are not great because of their architectural programme — they endure because their material and structural logic is sound enough to absorb two thousand years of changed use without collapse.

In Rome, Booyens also began to observe what happens when a city becomes so burdened with its own mythological status that it stops being a place for living. The work he produced during the scholarship — the African Trade Mission project, the Vertical Village on the River Tiber — explored the idea of the city as a purely natural place: one subject to the same constraints of energy, climate, and material as any building on a hillside in the Karoo.

"Jaco Booyens turns his attention away from the mythical and museum role of the city and sees it as a purely natural place… Architecture is the result of a series of careful considerations regarding a self-sustainable use of energy, the efficient functioning of the natural systems of energy supply, the implications of low-impact technology on the environment. Involuntarily and paradoxically, this creates an object with a powerful visual impact."

— Prof Alberto Alessi, Università degli Studi di Roma

Earth & Field

Back in South Africa, Booyens established his own practice and began what would become a seven-year project: the Rysmierberg farm in the Klein Karoo. He built it himself, with his hands, using clay from the site, solar and wind power designed from first principles, borehole and ram pump water systems, rammed earth walls, and a roof that tilts to catch both light and weather. Rysmierberg is simultaneously a home, a laboratory, and a demonstration that the passive climate strategies embedded in vernacular Karoo building are not cultural nostalgia — they are accurate engineering.

In 2005, he took on the Damaraland Clay Project in the Ugab River valley in Namibia — working simultaneously as architect and contractor, building with the clay of the riverbed in a landscape that demands economy of every resource. The project remains one of the clearest statements of his method: find what the land offers, understand its structural properties, build with it in a way that the climate can sustain indefinitely.

Between 2017 and 2020, Booyens led the restoration of the Buffelsdrift farmstead in Ladismith — a nineteenth-century cluster of outbuildings, stables, and a principal dwelling that had fallen into serious disrepair. The restoration sought not to produce a sanitised facsimile of the original, but to recover the structural and material logic that had made these buildings last as long as they did: adobe, rammed earth, lime plaster, reclaimed timber. Thermal mass and careful orientation managing the extreme diurnal temperature swings of the Klein Karoo without mechanical cooling.

The Gold Medal from the Domus International Restoration Awards in 2020 and the subsequent SAIA Award of Merit in 2022 recognised the project's integrity: the refusal to impose contemporary architectural language onto historic fabric, and the technical rigour with which traditional material systems were understood and reinstated.

Concrete & Computation

His most recent completed work, House Yzerfontein (2022–2024), demonstrates that the principles underlying earth architecture translate directly into contemporary concrete construction. Two flat concrete plates at different gradients, connected by a freeform vaulted shell designed in Rhino and Grasshopper and supported on tapered columns. The entrance door is laser-cut in 10mm mild steel — its geometry derived from the same parametric logic as the roof vault.

The work took years to arrive at its final form. Early versions explored honeycomb plywood structures generated for 5-axis CNC cutting — the fabrication costs were prohibitive, but the understanding of freeform geometry and structural optimisation that came from those iterations shaped every decision that followed. The form is determined by structural logic and climate response, not aesthetic preference. Beauty, as with the earth buildings, is the ineluctable result.

Recognition

Curriculum Vitae

1969	Born in Pretoria, South Africa
1996	B.Arch Cum Laude — University of Pretoria
1997	Bob Mould Architects, Walvis Bay, Namibia
1998	Winner, Project Phoenix Competition
1999	CMAI Architects, Thesen Islands, Knysna
2001	South African Rome Scholarship
2001	Registered Professional Architect — SACAP No. 7357
2002	DHK Architects, Cape Town
2003	Antarctic expedition — ALCI logistics team
2005	Contractor & Architect — Damaraland Clay Project, Ugab River, Namibia
2006–13	Rysmierberg off-grid project, Klein Karoo — design and self-build
2017–24	Independent practice — see projects
2017–20	Buffelsdrift restoration project, Ladismith, Klein Karoo
2019	Net Zero Energy certification — DelftX, TU Delft
2020	Gold Medal — Domus International Restoration Awards
2022	Award of Merit — South African Institute of Architects
2022–24	House Yzerfontein — concrete shell, freeform vault

Software

Construction Skills

Twenty years of hands-on construction including carpentry, welding, machining (lathe, mill), bricklaying, rammed earth, adobe, poured earth, electrical, plumbing, laser cutting, water jet cutting, steel folding and bending, irrigation, and hybrid PV/wind energy systems.

Specific technical knowledge of off-grid living systems: solar and wind hybrid generation, direct solar heating, borehole and solar pump systems, alternative pump technology including ram pumps and air lift pumps.