Going over your WILD edge ~ designing for a living world

* The fee includes accomodation, meals, equipment and the 6 day course.

Why refresh your practice and yourself?

This getaway rethink-feel-and experience few days won’t ruffle your hairstyle, but it will add new styling to how you design. Like all of us, I’m sure your practice relies on your creative abilities being fresh, alive and growing.

By strengthening your capacity to be creatively innovative, you’ll reinvigorate the unique identity of your practice. You’ll experience that designing with physical models, real surfaces and volumes, is key to creating beautiful sculptural buildings.

Client’s value genuine originality. It’s also what we all need as individuals to experience more fulfilment in our own lives.

Invest in your inner artist, take a week off to reignite your passion for design and touch the nerve of what motivates you personally and as a team.
It will focus you to produce your most inspired work.

You'll be reshaping the box… integrating straight and curved surfaces, reflecting on the laws implicit in nature, reassessing how you practice. And learning new ways of designing effectively in a team.

This six day course for architects and designers in the Towerland wilderness retreat will sharpen your design senses and creative capacity. It amplifies your awareness of what engenders aliveness in your designs. Immersed in the splendour of nature you’ll begin to appreciate its relation to design as a whole.

You'll leave feeling rejuvenated and inspired to be a more effective and fulfilled designer.

Through focussed and disciplined activities woven into experiences of untamed wilderness, this course will give you the opportunity to find deeper meaning and clarity of purpose in your practice and your life.

So what are some of the take aways ?

You’ll touch the nerve of what motivates you personally which will focus you to produce your most inspired work.

You’ll instantly elevate the dynamics of your design discussions to become a reliable source of creative ideas.

You’ll think with your hands to directly access fresh ideas.

You’ll discover ways of being enormously expressive and exciting without blowing the budget.

You’ll see how to confidently integrate curved surfaces into rectilinear designs by understanding the fundamental ABC’s of form.

You’ll experience how designing with physical models, real surfaces and volumes, is the key factor when creating beautiful sculptural buildings.

You’ll learn the 5 invaluable techniques and 3 advanced techniques we use to ensure our innovative designs are accurately built.

You’ll see why designing with refined feelings is essential to making your buildings timeless.

By allowing the wildness in nature to inform your inner wilderness you’ll have a glimpse of what it means to be wildly disciplined.

You’ll come to a deeper understanding of what your practice is really about.

And you won’t be the only ones heading for the Southern tip of Africa. We’re expecting designers from across the globe. So it’s an opportunity to have direct contact with a different cultural take on architecture and design.

This course will leave you informed, inspired, revitalised, slightly tanned (no red lobsters please) and ready to get ahead in the next year.

Who's facilitating & hosting ?

Keith Struthers & Shannon Flynn: from NaturalsCool. Architects and faciltators with decades of architectural experience in Scandinavia, Hungary, Germany, Namibia and South Africa, inspiring innovative design professionals to find deeper meaning in their personal lives through their creative practice.

Allan Kaplan & Sue Davidoff : from the Proteus School For Reflective Social Practice. Years of experience working and teaching in Africa, Latin America, Europe and Australasia with contemporary cutting edge thinking in the social sciences. Allan and Sue are also our hosts at the Towerland wilderness.

Where will it be ?

Towerland, in the Langeberg mountains in the southern Cape, South Africa, is a wilderness retreat which enables the living flow of nature to be present in all aspects of life.

From the accommodation to the meeting spaces to the mountains and rivers, the abundant presence of wilderness enters into and touches our thinking and our feeling, our sensibility for life.

We have taken care of every detail at Towerland to strengthen the relationship between the (outer) world of nature and our inner world, so that whatever we are doing at Towerland, those activities are strengthened in the profuse presence of nature.

When we slow down and connect with the rhythms of nature, our activities and our thinking become more rhythmic, more enlivened, more whole.

Surrounded by mountains, riverine valleys, exultant fynbos, soaring jackal buzzards, Towerland Wilderness offers a beautiful meeting space to foster creative conversation; and secluded yet communal, simple, comfortable accommodation.

A space for deepened meeting with one another and with the surrounding elements. A space where the quality of exploration is profoundly enhanced by the embrace of the contours of land and sky. A place for self-discovery

How can I sign up?

If you’d like to register for the course right now, fill in your details at the top of this page.

If you’re left with any niggling questions, write to us on our contact page.

We really look forward to meeting you and your unique creativity.

All the best,

Keith, Shannon, Allan and Sue.

PS. To keep updated with future course dates and innovative ideas sign up below...