Mike is a Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the Built Environment Program at the University of Canberra's School of Design and the Built Environment. He completed his BArch degree at the University of Pretoria in 1998, he attended the Glenn Murcutt Master Class in Australia in 2005, and he completed part-time postgraduate BPhil and MPhil degrees in Sustainable Development Planning and Management at Stellenbosch University from 2006-2011. He graduated with a PhD in Architecture at the University of Cape Town in 2021 with the topic “The search for hybrid tectonics in contemporary African architecture: Encounters between the global and the local”.

Mike’s professional experience includes working in the United Kingdom from 1999-2001 where he was involved with large commercial interior projects, before returning to South Africa where he became one of the Directors of a multi-disciplinary architecture, landscape architecture and urban design practice in Knysna. He worked there from 2001- 2011, during which time he completed a large number of residential and commercial buildings, and a series of industrial adaptive re-use projects that include the conversion of an old power station into the Turbine Hotel & Spa on Thesen Islands. He has completed various architectural commissions since then, with a focus on sustainable material use and adaptation.

He joined the University of Cape Town full-time in 2012 where he taught design and technology in the undergraduate programme and design and theory in the postgraduate programme until 2022. He was the project leader for the School’s annual Imizamo Yethu design-build project from 2012 – 2017, and he was the architectural team leader for Team Mahali, the joint entry between Stellenbosch University and the University of Cape Town, which won 2nd place in the architecture contest at the Solar Decathlon Africa held in Morocco in 2019.

He joined the University of Canberra full-time at the beginning of 2023, where he teaches design and technology across the undergraduate and postgraduate programs. His research interests are adaptive reuse, architectural technology, industrial heritage, low-carbon design, and Southern architecture and urbanism.

External link

https://canberra.academia.edu/MichaelMikeLouw