The brief was to make the mall's infrastructure legible as part of the Liesbeek River ecosystem. Riverlands sits on the banks of the Liesbeek — one of Cape Town's historic urban rivers — and the client wanted that relationship made visible in the building itself. Not a decoration, but a field guide: every species illustrated with scientific accuracy and painted at a scale that turns the concrete walls into the river corridor they face.

We began with research: identifying and documenting the species that actually inhabit the Liesbeek system — Black-Headed Herons, Pied Kingfishers, Cape Clawless Otters, Western Leopard Toads, Cape River Crabs, African Spoonbills and more. Each illustration was drawn from reference, checked for accuracy, labelled with common and Latin names, and then transferred to wall. The programme spans multiple levels of the parking structure and the mall's internal corridors — more than twenty species across hundreds of metres of raw concrete.