15/05/2026
Thirty years in the making.
In 1996, my final architecture thesis at Wits University explored AfroHub.za, an international exhibition and convention centre at OR Tambo Airport.
The project combined exhibition spaces, hotel and transit hotel facilities, airport-linked travelators, a media facade and what I called a “nerve centre”, a central operational space from which the building would be managed.
At the time, I was simply designing from instinct. Looking back now, I can see how many of the ideas that still shape my work were already there: movement, structure, light, technology, arrival, and architecture as a responsive experience.
The original thesis model is now almost 30 years old. Through AI-assisted restorative rendering, I was able to reinterpret those early model photographs and recover the architectural intention behind the project, not as it exists today as an aged model, but as it was imagined then.
Using the same visual language and rendering approach, it becomes possible to place that early work alongside the architecture we are designing today and compare the evolution more fairly.
The tools have changed.
The work has matured.
The understanding has deepened.
But the architectural DNA was already there.
Hugo Hamity Architects
From thesis to practice.
Thirty years in the making.
