Home is not just a building — how grief, healing and ubuntu taught me to rethink architecture

The body and the soul of a home

When you walk into a funeral home and see an open casket, something feels off. The body is there — intact, recognisable — and yet, the person you loved is gone. You don’t weep because the body has disappeared. You weep because the soul that animated it has left. What remains is a sacred museum of memory.

Architecture, I’ve come to realise, is much the same. Buildings are the body. People — their laughter, their dreams, their small daily rituals — are the soul.

I didn’t learn this from textbooks. I learned it through grief.

I grew up in South Africa, moving through 13 townships before I became a teenager. I saw how fragile housing could rob families of stability. My mother prayed constantly that one day we’d have a dignified place to call our own. But just a week before I left on a scholarship to study architecture in Michigan, she died. My father, still fighting to make her dream a reality, died shortly after I graduated.

My childhood home in KwaMashu, filled with the memories that shaped my sense of home (Photographs: Supplied)

Grief taught me that the loss of home is not the loss of walls — it’s the loss of the people, the memories, the love that could have unfolded within those walls. In that way, my understanding of architecture began not with presence, but with absence.

Peter Zumthor, the Swiss architect, writes in Thinking Architecture: “When I design a building, I frequently find myself sinking into old, half-forgotten memories... They are the reservoirs of the architectural atmospheres and images that I explore in my work.”

My parents’ absence became my first design brief. Their deaths reframed architecture for me — not as an act of construction, but of remembrance. In Zumthor’s terms, buildings are envelopes for memory, vessels for presence, and sanctuaries for the human spirit.

Building as an act of healing

In their memory, I designed two homes — each a tribute to the essence of who they were.

For my half-sister in Fourways, Johannesburg, I created a contemporary home, urban and sleek, yet softened with natural textures — warm woods, layered lighting and generous outdoor lounges. It channels my father’s cosmopolitan charm, his ability to make everyone feel welcome and his deep sense of ease in the city. The house feels like him: stylish, open, full of life and laughter, always ready to host.

The home I designed for my half-sister in Fourways, Johannesburg. (Photographs: Supplied)

For my mother’s family home, I designed a neoclassical anchor rooted in heritage. It’s a place for weddings, funerals, storytelling and multigenerational memory. The symmetry, tall columns and intimate courtyards echo my mother’s grounding nature — her warmth, her quiet strength, her devotion to tradition and family. She wasn’t loud, but her presence held the centre. This home does too.

These weren’t just buildings. They were acts of healing. Built not only with concrete and rebar, but with love, grief, memory and hope.

Zumthor describes how architecture can “absorb the traces of human life” — scratches on walls, worn stair treads, the scent of cooking lingering in a hallway.

The soul crisis in modern architecture

Yet far too often, our industry forgets this truth. We’re in a relentless race to build faster, cheaper, larger. Too many developments rise like mushrooms after rain — technically precise, but spiritually vacant. Designed for spreadsheets, not stories.

“If a work of architecture speaks only of contemporary trends... without triggering vibrations in its place, this work is not anchored in its site,” said Zumthor.

The result? Buildings optimised for efficiency but deprived of emotion. Functional, perhaps. Even aesthetically impressive. But inert.

When you strip buildings of story and soul, you lose what makes them last — not just structurally, but spiritually. And the consequences ripple outward.

Across the globe, we’re seeing a silent crisis in our cities: rising mental health struggles, triggered not only by socioeconomic pressures but by the very spaces we inhabit. Cramped apartments stacked into glass-and-steel towers. Minimal public squares. Little to no greenery.

Too many buildings feel like containers, not communities. Too many cities feel like machines, not ecosystems.

In Cape Town, apartheid-era planning still scars the landscape. Highways carve through communities, and vast stretches of land remain inaccessible — physically and economically — to most residents. Spatial segregation persists, reinforced by architecture that isolates rather than connects.

In South African townships, it’s common to find thousands living in densely packed homes with little access to public parks, playgrounds, or safe communal areas. A child’s first experience of public space is often the street corner — unprotected, unplanned and uninspired.

Natural light is blocked by overbuilt skylines. Parks, what US landscape architect and journalist Frederick Law Olmsted called the “lungs of the city”, are replaced by parking garages and luxury developments. He once said: “The enjoyment of scenery employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it; tranquilises it and yet enlivens it.”

Our built environment should be our balm. Instead, for many, it’s a burden. What good is a building if it houses the body but stifles the spirit?

What makes a building feel alive?

Some of the world’s most enduring spaces are not grand because of their materials, but because they anticipate human life.

Zumthor’s mountain hotel in Switzerland is one such example, where balconies are placed to catch the soft afternoon light and the scent of fruit flan welcomes guests as they return from a long walk.

Most traditional Japanese homes are another: flexible, breathable structures that morph with the seasons and the rituals of daily life. The rooms slide open to invite the garden in, and close tight to shield the family from winter’s chill. They are meditative in their simplicity, dignified in their intimacy.

Closer to home, the Ndebele homestead of South Africa offers a striking embodiment of place and identity. With its boldly painted geometric murals and hand-plastered walls, the Ndebele home doesn’t just shelter, it speaks. Its patterns carry history, its colours celebrate ceremony and its architectural language is shaped by the rhythms of the community. It is art, shelter and story woven into one.

The home I designed for my mother's family, in the place where she grew up — a tribute to her legacy. (Photographs: Supplied)

Likewise, Cape Dutch homesteads, thick-walled and veranda-lined, are crafted with climate, culture and community in mind. They are not simply shelters, but social stages where generations gather.

These homes and spaces listen — to people, to time, to land. They don’t impose. They adapt. And in doing so, they earn love. Like ageing hands or a well-worn shoe, they carry the wrinkles of presence. They are not just lived in.

A radical alternative: architecture with ubuntu

In African philosophy, ubuntu means: “I am because we are.”

Applied to architecture, it’s a radical shift. It means designing not for generic “users”, but for people — in all their grief, joy, mess, and beauty.

Zumthor echoes this when he says: “A good building must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life and thus of taking on a specific richness.”

This is not nostalgia. It’s a call for humility. When we design with only budgets and blueprints in mind, we build structures that may be seen — but never felt.

In the age of AI and mass production, our duty as architects is clearer than ever: We are not just designers of space, we are custodians of soul.

Developers optimise for profit; engineers optimise for function and architects must protect the spirit of the home.

Steve Mouzon once said: “If a building is not loved, it will not last.” I believe that. And I would go further: If a home is not loved, it cannot heal.

The architecture worth building

My parents dreamed of a home, not because they wanted shelter, but because they longed for a place where love could unfold safely, joyfully, freely.

That is still what every human being deserves.

A home is not where you live. It is where you are remembered. It is where your laughter lingers after you’re gone. It is the warmth your children return to. It is the hug your absence still gives.

That, to me, is the architecture worth building. DM

Wandile Mthiyane is a South African architect, social entrepreneur and founder of Ubuntu Design Group and Ubuntu Home. An Obama Leader and TED Fellow, his work bridges equity, design, and technology to create homes that nurture both body and soul.