It made them not only the first South Africans selected to design the pavilion — which has in the past been designed by superstar architects such as Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster and Francis Kéré — but also the youngest people in the project’s 20-year history to be given the chance to design one of the experimental temporary structures.
Their pavilion was to have been unveiled outside the Serpentine Galleries in London’s Kensington Gardens in a few weeks’ time — a curvilinear space “conceived as an event”, according to the architects, that took its inspiration from places where people, particularly migrant communities, gather across London.
It would have been built from cutting-edge, environmentally friendly materials, such as cork and K-Briqs — a new type of brick manufactured almost completely from recycled construction and demolition waste — and would reference new modes of architectural thinking.