Presented since 2010, the AZA2025 urban festival returns to unite international and local architects, cultural producers, thought leaders, academics and students in the built environment to exchange and discover innovative, alternative and future approaches to design and development.

Hosted by SAIA in collaboration with the Gauteng Institute for Architecture and the University of Johannesburg, the AZA returns for its sixth edition as the premier event for the South African architectural and built environment. Taking place at the main UJ Auckland Park Campus in Johannesburg from 29 -31 August 2025, Architecture.ZA (AZA) is presented under the themes “Where Architecture Meets Us/Planet/Future”, as an intersection of architecture, humanity, and future sustainability. The festival offers interactive presentations, debates, workshops, films, architectural and other exhibitions, tours, and fringe performance events.

Since the first conference, which took place here in Newtown, Johannesburg in 2010, AZA has consistently promoted the fact that architecture is a powerful weapon for social enablement. That it plays a critical role in shaping the future of the city and that Architects have the potential to ignite social change and transformation. Architecture is not only a product of culture, but it is culture-forming. It translates and negotiates, in daily practice, the full gamut of politics, economics, social benefits and responsibilities as well as our unspoken hopes, our wildest dreams, and our most base fears.

We know that architecture forms the frame for the ways in which people experience their lives, themselves, and their relationships with others. It is undoubtedly one of humankind’s most potent material manifestations. Architecture and the built environment are extremely revealing of the ways in which we view and construct ourselves as a society and as individuals within that society.

Issued by: Daniel van der Merwe, azaprojects@gifa.co.za

Note: Various members of the dhk Architects team will be part of the conversations happening at AZA, including dhk Partner and Executive Director Guy Briggs who is among the speakers on the programme.

‍