Marguerite Pienaar joined the Department of Architecture at the University of Pretoria mid-2016. She is a registered architect with 14 years experience in practice as a director at the firm HolmJordaan Architects & Urban Designers. Recent projects include the Novi Skin (Award of Merit, 2013) and Refilwe Urban Upgrade (Commendation Award, 2015). She also lectured, both full- and part-time, at various South African institutions over a period of 8 years, including the University of the Free State, the Tshwane University of Technology and the University of the Witwatersrand. She continues to be an external examiner at various institutions in South Africa.

Marguerite Pienaar finished a post-graduate Masters Degree on the work of Norman Eaton (1902-1966) at the University of Pretoria (2013) and was subsequently awarded the Neil Powell Neil Post-Graduate Award for the best complete post-graduate studies through research in 2014. She was the senior researcher for the South African-based Africa Drawn Project (Africa Drawn, Rotterdam: DOM Publishers, 2015), which focused on researching, visualizing, and curating cities in Africa. She was also a contributor to several publications, including the recent Building Construction Standards for South Africa/ARCHITECTIVE (2014) and the book South Africa since 1994: 100+ Projects. Marguerite read papers at the ‘Entangled Histories’ EAHN Conference, Belgrade (2015) and ‘Next Stop Kumasi’ (2007), Kumasi, Ghana. She was an invited speaker at the ‘Dialogue 25’ Conference, Bloemfontein (2013) and most recently, at ‘helloambassador 2015’.While her primary focus is on architectural design, she is keenly interested in the multiple perceptual forms and interpretations of architecture and its entanglements regarding conditions of historicity, phenomenology and cultural identity.