Craig McClenaghan

Craig McClenaghan is a Johannesburg-based architect, exhibition designer, artist and teacher, with a particular interest in creative research. After graduating from UCT in 2002, he worked for Mashabane Rose Associates for thirteen years before formally establishing his award-winning, eponymous studio, Craig McClenaghan Architecture (CMA) – an exploratory, multi-disciplinary design research hub, that engages collaboratively with researchers, writers, artists, curators, educators and students.
Working across a broad range of genres, CMA explores drawing as a mode of design research, often seeking alternate methods of representation throughout the process of design exploration, experimentation and realization. Recently completed narrative projects include Enclosures – an exhibition of pre-colonial history at Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum, the Nelson Mandela Capture Site Museum exhibition in Howick, The Mapungubwe Gold Exhibition at the Javett Arts Centre in Pretoria and Truth to Power: The Life of Archbishop Desmond Tutu at the Old Granary in Cape Town.
Architectural awards include the 2019 regional commendation award from GIFA for the transformation of the Rembrandt Art Gallery at Wits University and a national merit award from SAIA in 2018 for Pathways Through Time at Wonderwerk Cave in the Northern Cape. CMA’s design proposal for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Competition in Cape Town was on a final shortlist of three.
Letters from the Landscape was featured at the 18th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, The Laboratory of the Future, in the Curator’s Special Projects, Mnemonic, curated by Lesley Lokko.
Craig has been an invited critic, reviewer and examiner at several national schools of architecture, and currently leads Unit 21 at the Graduate School of Architecture, at the University of Johannesburg.