This project responds to the challenge of reimagining the Johannesburg Art Gallery and Joubert Park as a single, interconnected civic landscape. Rather than treating the gallery as an isolated heritage object, the proposal understands the institution as part of a broader urban system shaped by history, occupation, memory, and change. Drawing on the concept of the palimpsest, the project proposes an architecture of rewriting rather than replacement, where new interventions are layered onto the existing fabric while allowing traces of the past to remain legible.

At the heart of the proposal is the Low Line, a continuous public infrastructure that cuts through, beneath, and across the site, dissolving the boundaries between museum, park, and city. Storage, exhibition, circulation, and public life are reconfigured into an accessible and porous civic institution where art is encountered as part of everyday urban experience. The project ultimately repositions the Johannesburg Art Gallery as an evolving cultural landscape-one that embraces continuity, adaptation, and collective occupation rather than preservation as a fixed end state.