Gustav Roberts is a South African architect and founder of SALT Architects, a practice working across architecture with a focus on context-driven, materially grounded design. His work is shaped by a close engagement with landscape, climate, and human experience, approaching each project as a response to place rather than a predetermined formal outcome. A key built work, Calling Academy High School in Stellenbosch, reflects this approach through its integration with the surrounding winelands landscape and its use of restrained, everyday materials to create spatial clarity and social value. Roberts’ methodology emphasizes tectonic expression, natural materials, and a balance between rational construction and a more poetic reading of the environment. Across his practice, he explores architecture as a quiet mediator between people and place, aiming to produce spaces that are enduring, purposeful, and closely tied to their context.
What inspires you?
Nature; human ordering of nature – the garden; the ever-present opportunity (of a place) to hope for an eternal wholeness – maybe it is the beauty of when humans love one another; the smell of a workshop.
What inspired you to become an architect?
I was (and still am) very interested in most subjects. There is so much wonder in discovering life and creation. Architecture, being so physical, is a discipline that beautifully manifests the wonders of life in physical form.
How would you describe your design philosophy?
I see architecture not as a predefined answer, but as a response that emerges from asking the right questions. My work is rooted in a deep engagement with context—understanding place, people, and purpose before form.
I pursue a balance between the rational and the poetic, recognizing that meaningful architecture exists in the space between function and experience. My approach is guided by three interconnected concerns: the natural, the human, and the transcendent. I view architecture as a mediator between people and the environment, a carrier of cultural meaning, and a quiet expression of something beyond the material.
Each project is approached as a singular response grounded in clear principles. I prioritize spatial richness, thoughtful materiality, and a tectonic clarity that reveals how a building is made. My aim is not to create objects of attention, but places that belong—buildings that integrate seamlessly into daily life while offering depth, atmosphere, and a sense of continuity.
Ultimately, I seek an architecture of quiet significance—grounded in context, shaped by human experience, and open to meaning beyond itself.
What is your favorite project?
The latest one we are busy with. Currently, that is the New Apex Pinelands School.
What is your favorite detail?
A very simple way of using a pre-stressed concrete lintel centred in a cavity brick wall to prevent joints in the plasterwork on the façade, and also creating a recessed detail at the top of the opening.
Do you have a favorite material?
No, but I really love natural materials. I find highly processed materials like metal cladding systems, which are prolific in wealthier contexts, often difficult to accept.
What is your process for starting a new project?
The first step is always to develop a vision of the place in my imagination that excites me about what beauty, joy, and goodness it can possibly bring to the users.
How do you fuel your creativity?
Creativity for me is like an endurance sport. You need the grit to push through discomfort for long periods. The suffering now is part of the joy later, and so, like a marathon runner, we come to enjoy the fatiguing process. That doesn’t quite answer the question, so practically it is with too much coffee and loud Beethoven or Bach.
What inspired the Calling Academy Stellenbosch?
Calling Academy High School in Stellenbosch was first inspired by the bucolic winelands landscape. Set within a rural winelands landscape with a mountainous horizon, the threshold space between inside and outside became the main space, giving rise to the external foyer area behind the concrete block screen, with the screen becoming the mediator between man and nature.
How did materiality shape the Calling Academy Stellenbosch?
The budget was extremely low, which gave us the opportunity to use everyday materials (especially everyday for learners from a low-income area) in a specific and therefore beautiful way. It demonstrates to the users that opportunity and achievement are not limited to monetary value, and that has a profound impact on the learners.
What advice would you give to young architects?
Make things physically with your hands, in the real world, so that you develop a feeling of how materials behave. How heavy a steel beam is, how long a piece of wood bends when you pick it up and splinters when you cut it, how hard it is to drill a hole in a concrete wall, etc.
