Robert Silke

Robert is one of the South Africa's most prolific young architects, having recently led his firm to design some of Cape Town’s most iconic new developments - including Tuynhuys apartments, The Onyx apartment hotel, as well as Citadel Investments’ striking new granite head office.

Work further afield includes the successful new Garden Court hotel in Zambia’s Copperbelt for Tsogo Sun.

Prior to establishing the firm, Silke designed Chevron's award-winning national headquarters at Century City, as well as the futuristic Point shopping centre in Cape Town’s Atlantic Seaboard.

Silke is well known for his residential conversion of Old Mutual's former Art Deco Headquarters in the Cape Town CBD - and is widely credited as the catalyst for turning around the fortunes of Cape Town’s city centre.

Robert McGiven

Robert McGiven provides the technical and contractual backbone to the practice and is involved in a managerial capacity in every project with which the firm is involved.

McGiven has a pedigree of experience spanning his career at the world-renowned Noero Wolff architectural practice where he managed and documented international-prize-winning projects such as the Red Location Apartheid Museum in Port Elizabeth - and also for Johannesburg's Mashabane Rose architects where he similarly rolled out Atterbury's landmark Potato Sheds retail and restoration project.

McGiven's past work (prior to establishing RS&P) also includes Delft Symphony Community Housing, Usasazo Secondary School, Tramway Road Community Housing and even a sustainable diamond mine in Sierra Leone.

Sustainability

Robert Silke & Partners is committed to the principles of environmental sustainability. Our involvement in the design of the new headquarters for Chevron South Africa in Century City, Cape Town, which has achieved an as-built  5-Star Green Star rating, led us to understand that the entire consultant team (particularly mechanical and electrical) is critical in supporting architectural sustainability – and to this end we are experienced in identifying suitably-qualified consultants.

As a further consequence, our Partners and team have experience working with the Green Star rating tool provided by the Green Building Council of South Africa, and value it for its ability to focus the efforts of the design and consultant teams, and provide clear benchmarks for performance, while emphasizing the importance of an integrative design process in which ultimate energy and resource consumption are considered from the initial sketch design stage.

We do not regard sustainability as a new concept in architecture – rather it is a new emphasis on the first principles of good design, translating into buildings that are responsive to their immediate environment as well as responsible to the wider one.