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Menu Home Upfront Now Up Books Towns Structures People Firms Lexicon Ismai, CASSIMJEE Born: 1984 Architect Principal in the firm ISMAIL CASSIMJEE ARCHITECTS (ICA) AND URBAN DESIGNER. Awarded the SAIA Gold Medal of Distinction in 2026. Citation: l Cassimjee has 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-founder, 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, in work spanning master planning, 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 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, unpublicised 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. At Villa Senusi, restored and extended 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. Most recently, Fourways Crossing - awarded the SA KZN Special Mention Award in 2025 - distilled that same philosophy under real pressure. 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. The SAIA Gold Medal of Distinction is awarded to Ismail 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.