A remarkable sight greets visitors to the rolling coastal dunes of Keurboomstrand, north of Plettenberg Bay in South Africa’s Western Cape Province. Some liken the pristine white and organically shaped building to a space station, others to a ship afloat.
Architect Lesley Carstens, who, together with husband Silvio Rech, designed the remarkable form, offers a different take. “It looks as if it has been eroded like a piece of whalebone on the beach.”
Rech suggests that, from certain angles, you might discern the forms or motion of a pair of swimming whales. “It has the feeling of an organic object or being,” he adds.
The eye-catching building is something of a contradiction: it stops people in their tracks, yet its wavelike form is remarkably unobtrusive and sensitive to its natural surroundings.
Image Credits: Photographs by Greg Cox.