PTA - Waterkloof

HISTORY OF THE PRACTICE Du Plessis, Barnard, Moolman, or dbm for short, originated when as young architects Wynand du Plessis, Leon Barnard & Deon Moolman agreed to a possible future professional collaboration under this name. Based in Mokado (Louis Trichard), Leon Barnard has been running dbm in the Limpopo Province since 1991 while the other two founding partners gained experience in Johannesburg and Pretoria working for leading architectural firms. In 2003 Wynand du Plessis resigned as a senior partner of Boogertman Krige Architects to start the Gauteng practice in Johannesburg. Deon Moolman joined the practice from Dubai in January 2004 and currently heads the Pretoria Office. GREEN DESIGN It is our goal to achieve the optimum level of energy efficiency in all current and future  

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projects and to become leaders in the field of 'green design'. We have an in-house ‘green’ focus group responsible for continued research and development of ‘green design’ solutions and to provide regular feedback to the practice as a whole at monthly ‘green day’ sessions. We have also committed considerable resources in holding workshops and delegating staff to attend training courses, conferences and seminars on the topic. There is a high level of understanding of environmentally responsible and energy efficient design and construction principles in the office and we will be implementing this knowledge on projects in the immediate future. We expect to bring to our projects holistic and innovative passive design solutions that will be easy to implement within the context of the South African building industry. While there are realistic constraints to what is achievable within a feasible building cost framework, we believe that we are now capable of delivering buildings which will rely on electrically powered cooling or heating systems only in part or not at all.