Lost & Found is a material-driven design intervention for Workshop17 in Century City, Cape Town. What began as a simple material palette evolved into a spatial proposal for rewilding – not just as aesthetic, but as an active ecological restoration.

Before Century City was an office district, it was a wetland – part of the Diep River floodplain. Seasonal marshes, fynbos vegetation, and birdlife once thrived there, providing a habitat for diverse bird species, amphibians, and aquatic life. That ecological history shaped our approach.

The material assemblage looks at how can we create a workspace that co-exists with nature. Rewilding is the process of restoring ecosystems to their natural, self-sustaining state by reintroducing lost species, allowing ecological processes to regenerate, and reducing human intervention in nature. By integrating rewilding principles into the design concept of our workspaces, these environments can evolve into a living ecosystem – one where human productivity and natural regeneration coexist seamlessly. Instead of treating nature as an aesthetic backdrop, we create an interdependent relationship, ensuring that both people and the environment thrive together.

We assembled a material language that reflected the natural geology of the site: stone, ash, oak timber, woven textiles, leather, muted tones, and metals. A key material was marinace stone, a striking conglomerate rock made of pebbles bound together over millions of years, a geological record of ancient riverbeds.

As part of the concept and investigating the site’s origin as a wetland ecosystem, we invited designer and photographer, Jasmyn Krynauw to collaborate on the design of a series of artworks to create an immersive experience of the landscape, that were then developed into wallpaper and fabric for the various spaces. Through these surreal scapes, Jasmyn invites us into her series ‘Dreamscapes’ series – a personal recollection of how she sees and feels the environment across South Africa. Rather than treating nature as a backdrop, Dreamscapes imagines a rewilded approach, where people, place, and ecology are interwoven into a thriving living landscape.

Assemblage: Lost & Found proposes that workspaces can be more than efficient, they can be regenerative. That design can resurrect what has been buried, allowing forgotten ecologies to return. Here, fieldwork meant listening to land, to memory, to what was lost, and designing a space where it could live again.