Barbara van Zyl

Barbara van Zyl joined Jasmax in 2015, bringing a wealth of architectural experience and talent to the practice. She is a highly experienced architect, having worked on projects of varying scales and typologies in Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa.

Barbara employs a hands-on approach and enjoys performing the full spectrum of roles from a project’s inception through the design stages to implementation and delivery on-site. Barbara studied architecture during the 1970s in South Africa and graduated as the only woman in a class of 46 students. Throughout her career, Barbara has sought out projects with a social purpose - where her input on a project’s outcomes positively impacts the community it serves.

While running her practice in South Africa for nine years, Barbara was one of the lead architects for a new multi-purpose centre for the rapidly growing Cato Manor new town, a flagship project funded by the Nelson Mandela Foundation for Reconstruction and Development. Barbara also consulted the Durban City Council on the Warwick Junction Urban Renewal Program. This groundbreaking enterprise sought innovative African solutions to the historical problem of exclusion and disenfranchisement of informal black traders from the Durban CBD and periphery.

Barbara enjoys design roles and leading project teams through the documentation and construction phases of several large projects. She is currently the Project Architect for AUT’s A1 Building, an innovative, timber structure that will deliver roughly half of the embodied carbon of an equivalent new development. 

Barbara leads by example. Young female graduates have regularly sought her out to serve as a mentor. They have often commented that they feel empowered seeing her on-site – usually a lone woman – and holding her own in coordination meetings full of men. Barbara’s extensive knowledge and interpersonal skills have consistently led to successful, enduring relationships with clients, consultants, contractors and colleagues based on trust and integrity.