Flow staff have been hard at work with the redesign of the Ditsong Museum of Natural History in Pretoria.
For the past few weeks Wits University architectural student Daniel Trollip has been part of the team and has brought the project to life – in three dimensions.
He has designed, with the help of consultant to Flow Exhibitions Gegê Leme, two models of the exhibition spaces Flow has been working on.
“Between Gegê and myself, it took a week to make the models – it was a lot of precision work and very fine detail that can be tricky to work with.
“A model is by far the most useful tool to explain something in 3D, and it is fun to do,” says Daniel.
“Exhibition design is not something I’ve done before, it’s been interesting,” he adds.
Flow Exhibitions CEO Janet Berger, who worked with Daniel, says: “I’ve known Dan for years, he was at school with my son. Last year we needed some help on another project, finishing some technical drawings, and Dan and two of his classmates helped us out.
“They were very professional and reliable, so we approached Dan again this year to see if he could help with the Ditsong project. We weren’t sure how he would do with the model building ,but it turns out he helps teach model building to first-year students at Wits, so he must be pretty good.”
She adds that model building to this scale is all about precision and neatness, and that clients have found the models incredibly useful in terms of being able to visualise spaces, which can be quite hard to do from floor plans.
“We have now moved onto creating costing drawings for all the spaces and he is doing a great job there too. He brings a fresh eye to the designs and is aware of South African standards and regulations that Gege, having trained as an architect in Brazil, finds very helpful.
Dan is incredibly diligent and has absorbed two quite complex spaces very quickly and seems to have a feel not just for 3 dimensions but also the purpose of exhibition design for museums.”
Daniel is doing his Master’s degree in architecture this year. He says he has wanted to be an architect since he was in high school.
“I did my three years’ undergraduate studies at Wits, then spent a year in Durban and London, working for architectural firms. Last year I did my Honours.
“My passion is for design in transport – things like airports, train stations, bus terminals and taxi ranks. I think it’s a lot about people – the movement of people through these spaces.”