Al-Qalam 
By Al-Qalam Reporter
The South African Institute of Architects (SAIA) recently presented a “Gold Medal of Distinction” to Ismail Cassimjee of KwaZulu-Natal.
The SAIA Gold Medal of Distinction was awarded to Cassimjee in recognition of a four-decade career that has treated the conservation and renewal of Pietermaritzburg’s built heritage as inseparable from the practice of architecture itself, and for his lasting contribution to design excellence across KwaZulu-Natal.
Its president, Monique Gillespie, said Cassimjee had spent a lifetime “treating buildings as archaeology — reading what a place already holds, in memory, material and use, before deciding what it actually needs.”
Co-founded with his brother Haroon, of Ismail Cassimjee Architects (ICA) and Urban Designers, a practice that began, by their own account, ‘in their parents’ garage’ in 1984, Cassimjee has spent over four decades applying that instinct across Pietermaritzburg and the wider KwaZulu-Natal region.
His master planning included public buildings, healthcare facilities, commercial development, and the restoration of the city’s historic fabric.
That instinct showed itself early. Returning to the Church Street neighbourhood that he had grown up in, Cassimjee led the restoration of a small mosque that apartheid-era development freezes had placed off-limits for repair. The work went ahead quietly, funded by two brothers from the community who gave up building their own home to save it instead, and was completed at a point when, as one contractor on site put it, “prayer alone seemed to be holding the structure together.”
Cassimjee drew the mosque’s pattern work directly from a Quranic verse on light, reading its numerology into the geometry of the screen itself — an early, unpublished project that nonetheless set the template for everything that followed.
He later restored Pietermaritzburg’s old Magistrate’s Court, a civic building carrying the added historical weight of having held Nelson Mandela overnight following his capture, treating the building’s political and architectural history as inseparable.
During restoration work for the Ingonyama Trust Board and the late King Goodwill Zwelithini, his practice again balanced heritage fabric against a demanding new institutional brief, placing ICA at the centre of one of the region’s most significant cultural commissions.
Faced with a family-owned property in disrepair and a shoestring post-pandemic budget, Cassimjee’s team chose adaptive reuse over demolition wherever possible, salvaging brick from the buildings they could not save — bricks that had themselves originally been fired barely 600 metres away, at Pietermaritzburg’s historic brickworks.
He has described the ambition simply as turning a shoestring budget into a golden thread; the result is a small, lively precinct of independent tenants now genuinely woven into the neighbourhood’s daily life.
This conservation-led body of work has been recognised repeatedly over four decades — from the SAIA Conservation Award in 1989, through three Pietermaritzburg Heritage Society awards in a single year (2016), to the SAIA KZN Award in 2019.
