The interim editorial board [ieb] for the South African Institute of Architects (SAIA) journal wished to celebrate the occasion of the 100th issue of the journal published as Architecture SA, with a collaborative call for entries from all members of SAIA and their institutional and other affiliates. This 100th issue intentionally celebrating change, diversity, and inclusivity, breaks with the ongoing tradition of the dominance of singular voices of its forebears. The theme, “many voices”, echoes the new direction of the South African Institute of Architects in giving voice to those previously unheard. This issue the ASA, also marks the 110th publishing anniversary of its early predecessor, the Journal of African Architects, first published on 1 June 1911.
We were delighted to receive many articles and entries that could contribute to this envisaged reimagined journal. We believe their publication here is a precursor to a journal that is more accessible and transparent, more inclusive, more representative, and more critical. The ieb purposefully elected not to have a guest editor(s) for the issue, but rather to collectively curate the issue. The publication of all those selected entries has been unanimously agreed upon by the ieb.
The contributions include more than just uncritical submissions of recently built work to reflect a wide range of provocations. The response to the call for entries was dominated by pieces that reflect on the role of architecture and the challenges its practitioners face as is shown in the creative written and designed work as well as some of the built work contributed by both architects and students. By encouraging the inclusion of the previously unheard and voiceless, this issue hopes to make a substantial contribution to the necessary and ongoing processes of transformation.
Many architects and students of architecture remain excluded from networks of privilege. One consequence of this is that there is relatively little evidence of transformed architectural approaches in the built work of our towns and cities. It makes sense then that this issue provides a place for the much-needed conversations and investigations that will facilitate a transformed built environment.
The critical and optimistic provocations of many of the authors talk about the need to find new ways of approaching the problems of design. As we grapple with the challenges of the developing context of a post-apartheid South Africa, we recognise that we need to approach design and its teaching in a new and radically different way, which is often about asking questions and reframing the questions to include more possible answers.
Questions of heritage, meaning and memorialisation are looked at through new lenses. Design itself is questioned by encouraging and testing the idea that design could (and should?) extend to those it serves by understanding its historical propensity to be divisive and exclusionary. Questions of identity and culture are used to recognise and increase inclusivity. And – as always – the design studio or unit, enjoys this luxury, but it is also recognised that it is the place with the absolute responsibility to push boundaries and ask pertinent questions.
We trust that this issue not only brings new voices, but also diverse content, embracing ideas and directions for further critical engagement and debate by those many more voices yet to be heard.
the interim editorial board
ISSN: 1682-9387
EDITORIAL
interim editorial board
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COVER
Concept and process model for the design of the African Mobilities exhibition - Wolff Architects. Image credit Lindsey Appolis
Copyright: Picasso Headline. No portion of this magazine may be reproduced in any form without written consent of the publisher. The publisher is not responsible for unsolicited material. Architecture SA is published by Picasso Headline. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of Picasso Headline. All advertisements/advertorials have been paid for and therefore do not carry any endorsement by the publisher.
CONTRIBUTORS
click on image to read contributor’s biography.
ADHEEMA DAVIS
TULIZA SINDI
MARCEL HENRY
Dr CARIN COMBRINCK MUHAMMAD DAWJEE
Dr MPHO MATSIPA
SARAH DE VILLIERS
LINDY SCHIBL
GARRYN STEPHENS
NABEEL ESSA SUSHMA PATEL
Dr MELCHIOR JACOBUS STANDER
VILOSHIN GOVENDER
Dr EMMANUEL NKAMBULE
TANZEEM RAZAK
ILZE WOLFF HEINRICH WOLFF
NAADIRA PATEL
STEPHEN STEYN
Dr HUDA TAYOB
AMINA KASKAR
Dr CLAUDIA LOGGIA
THE REANIMATION OF ARCHITECTURAL CONTEXT
Marcel Henry
Architecture finds its roots in context and historically included the perception of land and landscape as a living entity, animated and filled with energy, mystery and forces too powerful for our rational minds to comprehend. As architects, we speak of the “genius loci” or spirit of place with the sincerity and reverence of our ancestors, who for thousands of years experienced forests, plains and ice-capped peaks as being alive and filled with spirit and life.
So when did landscape and buildings become limited to their material presence? and when did trees become timber and mountains granite? and when did “spirit” literally leave the building?
While this separation found its roots primarily in early western mythology and religious practice, it has since affected our response and relationship to land and landscape and continued unabated with disastrous consequences for the environment.
The problems are too numerous to list, but can be said to be generally centred around the critical concern of environmental degradation, resource depletion and waste, to name a few. Less obvious, however, is the loss of animate presence within nature and the emergence of materialism where land, nature and shelter are limited to their materiality and visibility.
Although there are current trends around sustainability and “re-wilding”, which can be considered sincere attempts to deal with environmental challenges and awareness of our relationship to nature, this approach lacks our ancestral perception of animate presence and remains largely sentimental.
To re-establish this connection, a revisioning of context and landscape is necessary, and so too our approach to architecture where nature and landscape cease to be mere scenery and views for buildings, but becomes instead a matrix in which we move, think and breathe.
It requires both a re-evaluation of our basic need for shelter and comfort and an awareness of resource. Where our desire for “beautiful” objects as symbols of wealth and status is questioned and revised. Where architecture and design become more than icons of luxury and wealth to be awarded and applauded, and expressions of human dominance over nature are displayed.
For the most part, it can be said that modernism encouraged a culture of entitlement to resource, where for as long as capital is available it may be exploited.
The re-examining of our relationship to land and landscape presents a starting point, where land is at the least attempted to be understood in all of its complexity. Where land becomes a stage for ecological performance and natural systems are considered the guiding script. Where wild forests are not romanticised as separate from us, but part of who we are.
In this scenario, our survival depends on the fierce protection of nature and resource is used sparingly, with consideration for future generations. Trending words such as sustainability and a cyclic economy come to mind, but do not effectively address the vulnerability of eco-systems or our own vulnerability. Until COVID-19.
1. Jeremy Bishop 2. Katie Doherty
AFRICAN MOBILITIES EXHIBITION
AfricanMobilities–ThisisnotaRefugeeCamp Exhibition brought together the most progressive thinkers and designers working on issues of mobility and architecture on the African continent and the diaspora Wolff Architects
The African Mobilities initiative, curated by Dr Mpho Matsipa, is a collaboration between the Architekturmuseum der TU München in the Pinakothek der Moderne and the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). The show opened in April 2018 at the Architecture Museum in Munich and ran for two years.
The design is an intentional distortion of the gallery space in Munich, evolving out of an intense process of paper folding and cutting. The effect was a series of intersections of circles, folds, gradations of light, colour and geometry. The exhibition experience was therefore a combination of surreal sculptural moments rooted in a constellation of social spaces.
One concern that motivated the overall design was to radically delay the visitor experience of the exhibition. For this reason, Wolff Architects provided
1. View of the exhibition featuring the Chimurenga Library (foreground) and Urban Tingwanekwane - the hole in Wall (background) image credit Heinrich Wolff
furniture, soft seating and a reading space looking out into a garden.
The exhibition was organised around three themes: Cartographies, Speculative Futures and Prototypes.
The first room is an immersive environment that disrupts the visitor’s visual senses by cutting out natural light and painting the room black. In one area, Mad Horse City (2018) – the virtual reality work of Olalekan Jeyifous and Olawale Lawal is juxtaposed with Sammy Baloji’s Essay on Urban Planning (2013) as anchors for the three themes of cartographies of migration and extraction, prototypes and future imaginaries (dystopia/utopias). These works are located in a gently lit, curved space that is draped in black muslin. Comfortable seating and soft carpeting are introduced to provide a sensual experience of both virtual and real experience.
The second room is anchored by the Chimurenga Library. This light-filled space forms the social heart of the exhibition with views out to the garden, where visitors are encouraged to engage with the alternative approaches to knowledge production, building technologies and urban infrastructures. The circular geometries, folded planes and layers of light and colour give depth to the space.
In the final room, Merkato by Emanuel Admassu, a specially commissioned tapestry that maps trade patterns in the main market in Addis Ababa, is mounted against one of the two freestanding pavilions in the space. The work of Doreen Adengo is presented in the same pavilion, the design of
which references the kitenge shops in Kampala and the mobility of Congolese traders and their wares in that region. The second pavilion in the room is designed to foreground the sound, text and graphic collaborative piece, Cartographic Entanglements, by Dana Whabira, Nolan Oswald Dennis and Thembinkosi Goniwe. The pavilion creates space for listening and echoes the seating configuration of trains as the key focus of the piece is to map the entanglement between railway infrastructure, music and urban development.
A WORD FROM THE CLIENT
African Mobilities – this is not a refugee camp exhibition, curated by Dr Mpho Matsipa (Researcher, Wits City Institute), was a 2-year long collaboration between the University of the Witwatersrand and the Architecture Museum at TU München, Germany that was funded by Kulturstifung des Bundes, German Federal Cultural Foundation, with support for a traveling show by the Goethe Institut in 2019 and 2020. The show opened in April 2018 at the Architecture Museum in Munich, an architectural research museum belonging to the Technical University of Munich, Germany, with the largest collection of architectural exhibits in Germany, housed inside the Pinakothek der Modern, a 22,000 sqm building, alongside special collections divided into art, architecture, design and works on paper. The design brief developed with Wolff Architects, called for a space of delay and an invitation to engage with and archive how Africa-oriented thinkers approach future urban imaginaries and architectural
and urban prototypes that were instigated by a world in motion.1 The exhibition was organized around three themes: Cartographies, Speculative Futures and Prototypes.
African Mobilities was conceptualized as a distributed exhibition in Munich and across Africa and the diaspora, that privileged process over product and as part of a transformative cultural and pedagogical experiment that was in part, concerned with producing a “living archive”2 of contemporary spatial research practices.
2. View of exhibition featuring Mad Horse City by Olalekan Jeyfous and Wale Lawal (foreground and right) The Territoryin Betwee: image credit Heinrich Wolff. 3. View of the exhibition featuring the Chimurenga Library (background) and Beyond Entropy (foreground) image credit Heinrich Wolff
African Mobilities was equally concerned with intellectual mobilities – the circulation of ideas across linguistic, territorial and disciplinary divides, that was conceptualised as:
• a physical space, that had a total of 44,000 visitors from April- August 2018
• a series of 8 decentralized events,
• a digital publication (http://africanmobilities.org/ african-mobilities-exhibition/)
• a mobile pedagogical platform, named ‘Exchanges’
• and a trans-continental network that comprised of architects and other creative practitioners (both emergent and established), theorists and scholars from fourteen different locations, (including Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Addis Ababa, Luanda, Abidjan, Lagos, New York, Dakar, Nairobi, Lubumbashi, Praia and Munich. )
• It included 9 different institutions, including Columbia University’s Global Africa Lab and 8 workshops and discursive platforms across Africa and the diaspora.
Dr Mpho Matsipa, curator
PROJECT INFO
Architect Wolff Architects
In collaboration with Mpho Matsipa, Andres Lepik, Teresa Fankhänel, Ilze Wolff, Jennifer van den Bussche, Bubblegum Club, Allison Swank
Project Address Architekturmuseum der TU München in der Pinakothek der Moderne
Barer Str. 40, 80333 München
Completion Date June 2017–May 2019
Floor Area 600m2
Client The Architekturmuseum der TU München
Dr Mpho Matsipa
4. View of exhibition featuring Carthographic Entanglements (background) and From Abijan with (built-in) love (foreground) image credit Heinrich Wolff.
5. View of the VR space for wiewing the Mad Horse City by Olalekan Jeyfous and Wale Lawal image credit Laura Trump 6. Concept and process model for the design of the exhibition image credit Heinrich Wolff.
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THE ACT OF SERVICE 2020
The
work
and focus of the University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture Unit 19
Tuliza Sindi ( unit leader) and Muhammad Dawjee ( unit tutor)
UWE INVESTIGATE THE WAY SPACE CAN MIRROR THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN RENDERED DISPOSSESSED, INFRASTRUCTURAL AND WITHOUT REFLECTION.
nit 19 examines the sociopolitical characteristics of service infrastructures and their historical and continued contributions to society-making. The definition of service infrastructures varies. State structures refer to them as systems such as municipalities and built infrastructures like highways and water supply systems. It defines the body (servitude, slavery), roles (civil servant, servant of God), is used in some commercial industries as a unit of measurement (service ratings), and defines entire industries (service industry). NGOs and social enterprises identify it as their “bottom line”,
1. Tree of Man. (Image by Dimpho Selepe).
and it is also used to describe facilities, ceremonies, and rituals. The word’s root servise (old French) means “act of homage” (Hindley, Langley & Levy 2000), which describes a public expression of faithfulness – social contract or public declaration of trust – toward one’s shared values.
These human constructions of service are rooted in transaction, but what/who the giver is and what/ who the receiver is, is not always conspicuous. Even what is given and what is received can be ambiguous. It operates performatively, taking place primarily in conditions of public life from the scale of the individual to that of state systems.
Unit 19 is interested in the Trojan-horse agreements made between states through the service-based relationalities that function as tools of permission, legitimation, structuration, and absolution for power structures. Three outputs (or ordering tactics) that both architecture and service have in common are of interest to the unit.
1. The categories they produce – how they differentiate public from private, solid from void, native from transgressor and believer from unbeliever.
2. They build associations. The word “association” comes from the same Latin root for society socius and describes the act of producing society (De Vaan 2008). 3. They produce obligations – to permanence, consequence and meaning. Through primary embodying methods of scripting and performance and, embedded within that, methods such as cataloguing, stitching, collaging, prototyping and installing, the unit works simultaneously at the scales of society and of the body, to reveal their interconnectedness and interdependence.
The unit starts from the position that architecture is an extension of our bodies. We explore what happens when our bodies – as politicised – are not extended and left to function in the world, mostly through and as the extensions of others, leaving one to become their own architectures as well as the architectures of others.
We investigate the way space can mirror those who have been rendered dispossessed, infrastructural and without reflection.
This year, the students proposed a ritual service for their major design project. Although immaterial in definition – a ritual service is performed into existence and disappears after the performance is concluded – it requires a vessel in which to play out; its bounds determined and concrete. The students’ proposals are rooted in Christian religious concepts, and approach society-making as a continuous and upscaled ritual service (tithes as tax, churchgoers as surveillance, Bible as law), to reveal Christianity’s role as a disarming vessel through which sociopolitical orders are offered and performed.
The Church Square Precinct in Pretoria was the Unit’s 2020 site of enquiry. Students engaged site within their current geographic location while traversing its realities and time. In 1904, the church from which the Pretoria city plan was born was demolished. The church provided a scaffold for the city and held that space temporarily, allowing the city’s blueprint to emerge. Once able to stand on its own, the city removed its church scaffold without erasing its ritual foundations. Now a public square in an ever-evolving central business district, the students observed the space’s ongoing spatiopolitical evolutions.
Borrowing from the biblical concept of predestination, projections of the future were tested by stepping into them in the present to negotiate their lifelines against the threats that the present poses. This allowed the students to interrogate simultaneous and comparative “presents”.
2. Navigating the white laager – A Church Square game. (Image by Lynette Boshoff). 3. 15h10 – The aftermath. (Image by Tuki Mathibedi).
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MAKING AND MEANING AT THE MARGINS
Imagining The Department of Architecture and Industrial Design at TUT
Sushma Patel, Dr Melchior Stander, Dr Emmanuel Nkambule and Stephen Steyn
The Department of Architecture and Industrial Design (ARCH+ID) at the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) is a school of architecture at the margins. Historically, the school was part of the old Technikon system, designed to transfer practical competence from skilled practitioners and craftspeople to students and apprentices. It was transformed into a University of Technology during the national restructuring of South African universities in the early 2000s. This transformation set in motion a gradual and continued increase in emphasis on balance between technical competence and critical reflection. The school originally offered diplomas and BTech degrees, but today it offers BArch and MArch degrees. ARCH+ID is perceived as a school at the margins of the city, its province and of intellectual knowledge. This perception persists at the periphery of the minds of many. And we embrace this perception.
The school is at the coalface of transformation; ARCH+ID can therefore no longer be ignored. The gaze from the fringes offers fresh new ways of seeing and space for growth and relevance in the broader social context. The diversity of the staff and student body (a changing student profile; the attraction of students of all races from the old Bantustans, rural areas and small towns) gives the school an advantage in anticipating emerging and underappreciated niches for the profession.
There are six special features of the school that interact to give it a unique offering and identity. They are: model and make, the foundation programme, the urban and social contract, technology as design philosophy, work-integrated learning and the Anthropocene.
MODEL AND MAKE
In 2018, the school introduced modelling and making explicitly as an integral part of studio-based teaching throughout the entire school, after setting up the department’s MAKERSPACE facility. This ethos was carried further through the subsequent merger with the Department of Industrial Design in 2019. Model and make, as a teaching approach, explores the designer’s will to create, make, experiment, and then theorise or reflect. Created objects, spaces and places are perceived to contain embedded knowledge of the creator. Students are given materials such
1. Photogrammetry 3D of the Pretoria Great Synagogue (The Old Synagogue) (Image by Andrea Di Filippo and Mostert van Schoor, 2018).
as concrete, plywood, and drywall (among other building materials), which are often sourced through industry liaison and sponsored partnerships. Design briefs are developed to help challenge and guide students to configure and/or reconfigure, assemble and/or disassemble, arrange and/or scatter these materials resulting in meaningful artefacts, which are then usually donated to selected communities for everyday use. Prototyping is at the core of this experimental design-teaching approach and therefore students are taught fundamental construction techniques. In addition, all first-year students are required to complete a one-week building-skill course including bricklaying, tiling, carpentry and more.
THE FOUNDATION PROGRAMME
The foundation programme is formulated as a bridging course to move students from a nonarchitectural background into the world of architectural studies. The curriculum designed to achieve this is based on the concept of universal languages (lingua franca). Every discipline and vocational area has its own language, which acts as the common currency for acceptance and entry into that specific field. For students to be successful in their chosen field, it is important that they are fluent and adept at that particular language. The universal language of the art, design and architecture communities is drawing.
Many students in the foundation course come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Through the programme, they are given the skills to express themselves through drawing right from the beginning of their studies. This fluency in the language of drawing, in turn, grants them immediate
access to perform well in the mainstream course. The techniques employed here are centred between two core poles, drawing well, and drawing fast The range of possibility established between those poles generates a voice for them that otherwise would have been lost. Lecturers and classmates generally experience graduates of the foundation as fluent in “design speak” as they can easily convey ideas and concepts without the need to use superfluous language or slow, time-consuming computer imagery. Graduates of the programme have demonstrably improved ability to comprehend scale, texture, depth and can develop a basic design language for themselves through emplacement, exploration and self-discovery. This, in turn, leads to confidence, uniqueness of approach and a solid grounding in basic design principles.
THE URBAN AND SOCIAL CONTRACT
The master’s programme in design – MArch (Prof) –intensively considers the physical and social context within which the design is proposed. Contextual informants include theories from the Global South, urban planning, themes of urban and rural character, informality and suburbia. Urban, multistorey complexity, inner-city development and density are key aspects of the programme. Accessibility, transformation, “incrementality”, adaptive reuse and social housing are further themes of investigation.
2. Drawing 1 to Drawing 5 by Mel Stander (2020) illustrate principles of drawing and architectural design concepts. 3. Year 5 Urban mapping project (Drawing by Laetitia Lamprecht, A Plaatjie, S Myburgh, 2018).
Students are exposed to the urban realities of our cities. It is through the experience of others’ lived experience that we can better understand our cities and our service to the public. The master’s programme in design encourages onsite work, walking the city, documenting, narrating and critically analysing the physical and social conditions of place. It is important that the background, approach, ethos, ideology and world view of individual students are sensitively taken into consideration in the teaching environment. Inclusivity and integration of the diversity of the student cohort in the studio is part of the urban and social contract.
TECHNOLOGY AS DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
The architectural technology programme is a design-research field adjacent to the MArch (Prof) studies. It is an optional career path that runs from the fourth to sixth year. In these programmes, the simulations common to architectural education (client, site, building, budget) are adapted to allow peripheral practices and possibilities to be explored in more depth. Here the scale can vary between the conventional architectural scale to the abstract and microscopic world of material properties and thermal forces.
In the undergraduate programme, real-world, built projects and industry engagement form the backbone
of the curriculum. In the postgraduate programme, mechanics, materials, details, manufacturing, management, and experimental research are foregrounded with the aim of producing candidate architects who are entrepreneurial, dynamic, specialised, passionate and critical.
WORK-INTEGRATED LEARNING
A unique feature of the school is the integration of real world architectural practice into the curriculum. The second year consists of a six-month tuition component and a six-month working component. The institution actively recruits practices for apprenticeship-based learning and then assists with pairing students with practices. This work-integrated learning approach ensures students receive a good grounding in actual projects and the workings of architectural offices. The student that returns to the third year of study, more often than not, has improved competencies and certainly an improved sense of the day-to-day activities of architects. In addition, the programme facilitates networking and helps students understand the employment landscape that they are being prepared for in the undergraduate programme.
THE ANTHROPOCENE
The Building Physics and Systems Design stream of modules (first to fourth year) have been introduced to help students begin to grapple with the biggest challenges that we are currently facing as a society and as a planet. Topics ranging from material innovation to energy-efficiency have been embedded as a design tool in the programme to ensure that the study of the Anthropocene is central to the solutions to global environmental, economic and social crises.
CENTRING
At ARCH+ID, we are in the business of empowering students to make meaningful contributions to the profession through skills and technology transfer, teaching and instruction. However, we are also, through critical reflection, aiming to produce graduates that not only serve the profession, but who also have the confidence to hold it accountable to the public, which it is, in turn, meant to serve.
In a global world, where there aren’t really edges – since we know that practically all architecture happens in the thin sliver between the biosphere and the stratosphere – and everywhere is a centre to someone, the opportunity exists to claim from the periphery the centre’s status as a place where knowledge is legitimised.
4. Photogrammetry 3D of the Moxomatsi Village stone ruin, Mpumalanga (Sara Morena, 2018).
out of place
panel contribution on race, transformation, and saia adheema davis
in this, and every exercise, i claim no moral superiority and reclaim my own position, story, and heritage. i will no longer accept advances to erase, pacify, or nullify my existence. i acknowledge my place on stolen land, built by the hands of enslavement; i celebrate, and support the enduring connection of all indigene, creole, and enslaved people to it.
i step on the old silences of the city profession i open by paraphrasing gabeba baderoon’s poem, a prospect of beauty and unjustness, in which she describes navigating the streets in the city of cape town, once alive with expressions of the daily life of black, indigene, people of colour (bipoc), now forcefully removed and generations later, still traumatically out of place.
as a muslim, black, racialised as coloured woman architect, with a family history littered with traumas of the apartheid-colonial era, a prospect of beauty and unjustness reverberates as the colonial, exclusionary foundations of this institute are still very much alive in the continued covert exercise of not seeing, not hearing, and not embracing the presence of blackness – or anyone on the spectra of social identity that does not align with old, white, male, architect with a capital a. i say this as plainly as possible because regrettably it has been an undeniable aspect of my experience as a committee member and vice-president of the saia kzn region.
i am grateful to saia for its platform – it is indicative of the kind of commitment needed away from the superficial preoccupation with rainbowism, eloquently unpacked in tariq toffa’s essay, learning to speak, that has denied bipoc practitioners, students, and the south african public the reconciliatory work necessary for meaningful transformation. the theme of “many voices” extracted from president kate otten’s inaugural speech has given us each the
i will no longer accept advances to erase, pacify, or nullify my existence.
opportunity to speak, to be heard – and perhaps, a way to be embraced. as a segue into this discussion, i will reflect on language – so deeply ingrained in our profession.
we describe architecture and our built environments as being with language. as an exercise within the framing of this critical dialogue, i will reflect in particular on the word excellence, and how it has been used to maintain delusions of meritocracy of the supposed status quo. i say supposed, and i mean it, we cannot hold a bar on the basis of a fraction of our professionals, let alone our society. i work in a practice where the values of ownership and communication reveal themselves to be at the core of each endeavour – in this exercise then, i must take ownership and communicate on my own relationship with excellence. as a child, being told “not to roll my r’s” and “that you speak well … (for a coloured girl)” was a regular form of praise at my former model c primary school in the mid 1990s. of course, this conditioning has only recently been processed for what it is – a conditioning to the standard of whiteness as aspirational, as excellent – and i acknowledge my joyful reaction and performance of my own assimilation to whiteness to be deemed excellent – an assimilation to whiteness and a gravitation away from my own identity for my entire life. acknowledging the graft in consciously working to unlearn, reveal, and demand accountability for this within myself and others.
“award of excellence”, “architect with a capital a”, “high architecture”, are all terms that have been used around the institute in matters relating. equally, in my presence and proximity to these terms, certain individuals within the institute have elected to exercise the terms “unsuitable”, “ill-equipped”, “not-aligned”, and “troublemaker” to reaffirm the exclusion of myself and those like me, distancing the institute from the possibility of progress, of relevance, of embracing our south african context. my involvement with saia kzn was through the invitation of karuni naidoo and ruben reddy, who, along with current president skura mtembu, i consider as revolutionaries of transformation within the region. navigating the presence of exclusion, colonialism, and racism within this space would not have been possible without them. while i am grateful for the invitation to this space, i am acutely aware of the way in which foundational mechanisms exist to perpetuate these practices; keep the revolutionaries as individuals standing out of the collective value of the communities that they represent; and the likes of me constantly having to pull up my own chair to their table when it comes to intervening in the tightly protected notions of “excellence”. the words of the incredible shirley chisholm – the first africanamerican woman elected to us congress in 1968 –echo “if they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”
pulling up a seat sounds exemplary, and it is to an extent, it is the bold move necessary to be seen and heard … but it perpetuates the notion of the individual revolutionary, which, in no way discrediting the tiresome work that others have endured, is a tactic of distraction from the task of unravelling structural racism within institutions, and a deflection from the possibility of embracing bipoc within. it has enabled me when raising a charge of discrimination against a well-known member within my region to be exposed to an unnecessarily cumbersome 14-month entanglement of a professional dispute as the mechanisms for meaningful resolve – in the institutional effort of clutching to rainbowism – do not exist. simply, there is graft to be done, but i am exhausted by my folding chair, even more so in democratic south africa in 2021, and commit myself instead to the potential of a new table, one that celebrates equity, one that reflects the society of our country, and one that embraces presence and excellence of us across the spectrum of social identities. how meaningful the institute could be if it willingly opened itself to re-evaluations of meaning, of value, even that of “excellence”.
I will end with a provocation for each of us as part of a collective, and reference our country’s most prized constitution:
we, the people of south africa, recognize the injustices of our past; honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land; respect those who have worked to build and develop our country; and believe that south africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity. we therefore, through our freely elected representatives, adopt this constitution as the supreme law of the republic so as to —
heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights; lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law;
improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and
build a united and democratic south africa able to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations.
may god protect our people. nkosi sikelel’ iafrika. morena boloka setjhaba sa heso.
god seën suid-afrika. god bless south africa. mudzimu fhatutshedza afurika. hosi katekisa afrika.
- the preamble of the constitution of south africa, 21 march 1996.
the possibility of recognize honour respect believe are far more indicative of the embrace that we need.
pulling up a seat sounds exemplary, and it is to an extent, it is the bold move necessary to be seen and heard …
RESCRIPTING EVERY DAY SPACES OF COLONIAL POWER
To accommodate the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience Tanzeem Razak
The conservation of historically significant buildings in post-apartheid Johannesburg still largely remains limited to restoration only and has failed to transform spaces beyond their contentious past. As Rahul Mehrotra points out in “Constructing Cultural Significance”: “I think modernism has not taught us a way to view the past and integrate it into the future and the present. It hasn’t taught us the differences that exist in a city versus looking at it as a singular ideological stance.”1
There has largely been a reluctance to confront the issues of racial and spatial segregation that have shaped these historic buildings. Pre-eminence has been given to the architectural value of buildings with a nostalgic eye on neutral architectural details, while voices of the “other” painful histories remain unmarked.
This project began as an exploration to find, for the University of Witwatersrand, a permanent home for one of its six research institutes – The Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB) – within the new urban development framework that connected the various campuses across the city.
The brief from the client was to redevelop the selected site located on Jubilee Road in Parktown, Johannesburg to suit the needs of the new tenant – SBIMB. Lemon Pebble Architects, in collaboration with GreenBrick Architects, were keen that the redevelopment and chosen site should reflect the mission of the institute and its position at the forefront of research and development in genetics and molecular science.
The focus of the architectural team from the outset was to intentionally explore beyond mere restoration of the forms
and to rescript the architectural intervention from expressing a single narrative to a more inclusive history, which might excavate the impact of other marks that had been subverted on the site. Ideas around what might express a more equitable spatial history were explored through the research and excavation of the various layers of history of these spaces and making it explicit in the making of the form. A critical approach was adopted through the unpacking of the various layers of alternative social histories, indigenous landscape and identity to allow for a multiplicity of readings.
The architectural team was of the opinion that historically significant buildings in Johannesburg still largely remained limited to restoration to a particular time and failed to meaningfully transform spaces that had a contentious past. There was and continues to be a reluctance to confront issues of racial and spatial segregation that shape these buildings. Local heritage bodies were resistant to any additions that did not restore the building to its original form.
When Jubilee Road, named in honour of the 60th anniversary of the reign of Queen Victoria, was built in 1897, a distinct sociopolitical and economical hierarchy existed. The coveted street of Jubilee Road occupied the highest point on the Johannesburg ridge positioning it as the metaphorical “frontier line” to the rest of the unoccupied landscape below.
Parktown, at the time, was an exclusive, gated suburb that housed the affluent Randlords and mining professionals who had moved from the dusty mining camp of Doornfontein. Access to the suburb for the black miners and less privileged who lived in camps below was severely restricted.
The Randlords had a vast pool of regimented, strictly controlled servants of other races who maintained the site as an enclave of private privilege boasting manicured lawns and pruned gardens in a town of limited water and dust.
The mark and impact of the staff and people who contributed to the making and upkeep of these homes remain subverted and undocumented.
The house, originally called “the Mount” was set back from the road, and was ideally positioned on the Johannesburg ridge, arguably one of the best views towards north of Johannesburg. Over time, its south facade with the elegant portico remained largely untouched while the northern facade was incrementally added onto. By the time the client acquired the property in the 1970s, it largely remained a freestanding mansion set in a landscaped south garden. The landscaped garden was a nostalgic reminder of England that required large resources of water to remain pristine in a town where freshwater was a scarce resource.
The first phase of the project required the main house to be converted into spaces for the running of the institute and engagement with other academics. The northern facade was excavated layer by layer and a glass box was inserted to accommodate the most public entities of the brief – the library and boardroom. The original columns, which had been demolished, were uncovered and reinstated as an acknowledgement to a definitive past, while the new layer of the steel and glass box shifted deliberately off-axis to challenge and differentiate it from the original structure.
The secondary outbuilding, originally housing the stables and cramped staff quarters, was upgraded to the primary function of the institute as its laboratory. The intention here is to invert the relationship of servile spaces to more dominant spaces and functions.
In phase two, the growing institute required additional laboratory space on the lower level to accommodate specialist functions and office space on the upper floor. The initial urban scheme advocated for the urban edge to the historic road, while the heritage limitations required that view lines to the main house be preserved. Considering that the new laboratory did not necessitate a direct connection, the new building positioned itself to the north of the existing converted laboratory, allowing for the heritage building to be viewed without obstruction while directly connecting to the existing laboratory. This positioning encroached on a historic coal store that was reimagined as the access staircase reusing the original bricks.
The new laboratory was conceived as a simple box to accommodate the inherent constraints of a high-level laboratory while still providing sufficient light and views of the mature treetops. The upper level is opened to the north and west towards the vista of Johannesburg.
Ultimately, the project aimed to expose, record and thereby make physically visible the layers of history by restoring forms of the past and overlaying it with new forms and architectural language in an attempt to have a multiplicity after readings and make subverted voices heard.
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1. Phase 1: glass box inserted as a public layer into the restored north heritage facade. 2. Phase 2: new laboratory building within the landscape framing the rescripted heritage building. 3. Site and urban plan: Jubillee Road reimagined as a layered urban institutional edge.
CAPTURING LOST AND ABANDONED SPACES
A set of hybrid mapping tools was used to co-design lost and
insurgent spaces in Durban Viloshin Govender and Dr Claudia Loggia
Like every city in South Africa, Durban was planned on apartheid principles. Such planning led to the creation of various development nodes, which are most often developer-driven and do not cater to the existing communities’ needs. As a consequence, the lost space created between urban nodes within the city became a place for insurgency. In South African cities, insurgency can be seen in the form of informal settlements, informal markets, and urban homesteaders (squatters and homeless, using private property or government land).
We developed and applied a set of hybrid mapping tools to capture lost and abandoned spaces and understand how they are currently being used and adapted by the community. We applied the same tools to different case studies in Durban, ranging from dense informal settlements in sub-urban areas, such as Havelock settlement and Quarry Road, to inner-city spaces in the Point precinct. By mapping spaces between development nodes, this research seeks to capture and stimulate factors that can stitch together urban nodes and collective life.
The first tools proposed were drone mapping and transect walks. These tools were used to capture several informal settlements’ characteristics, such as Havelock (Durban North) and Quarry Road (Westville). Drone-based maps provide the community with an accurate depiction of their settlement, making the process of collaborative mapping much easier.
A collaborative mapping process was employed with selected residents living in the community. The general approach is based on a community engagement model developed by African Centre for Cities (Gurney et al., 2014).
The collaborative mapping approach deals with the lived experiences of communities within a specific area. Inspired by this model, the authors developed a new hybrid mapping methodology based on the combination of participatory mapping with drone photography, which leads to a 4D-lived map (Govender & Loggia, 2017; Loggia & Govender, 2020). The process of collaborative mapping can test problematic issues of the
policy when related to the built environment and how they affect community lives and their responses to it (Stokols et al., 2013). The response of mere stories that a person or community experiences and shares towards the mapping process integrates the diverse experiences, knowledge, and memories found in a place. The use of sketches done by the community in the mapping processes provides multiple forms for expression, allowing communication of everyday experiences and sentiments that may be difficult to put into words (ibid.).
The “4D-lived” maps are different from the ones usually used by the municipality, planners, and architects as they encompass the community’s social and cultural factors. The mapping process involved interviews and sketches, and overlaying these factors to produce an accurate representation of a place. One can fully understand the social, physical, and economic conditions of a site through these maps. They also categorise important features found in cities, paths, nodes, edges, landmarks, and districts. Lynch’s mapping techniques have become an essential technique in understanding the complexities and dynamism of urban spaces where one object relies on the other to exist in the urban fabric. The 4D-lived map goes beyond Lynch’s map as it captures experiences, socioeconomic conditions, and lost space.
3
The proposed methodology implies using drone technology to capture the selected site while providing new perspectives (for example, 3D views, bird-eye views, among others) for space representation. The drone imagery also produces quantitative data (for example, topographic info, altitude, and other) that can add to the research’s
Figure 1&2. Mapping the transect walks using drone-based maps with the residents. (Source: Author).
Figure 3. 4d-lived map, the final output from the collaborative mapping process. (Source: Authors).
reliability and rigour. It follows a set method, which can be reproduced to test results and findings.
Combining drone imagery with collaborative mapping methods produces accurate “lived”maps that encompass the general topography, spatial, social, economic, and political dynamics of a chosen site to create a 4D-spatial map. (Govender & Loggia 2017; Loggia & Govender, 2020).
Such 4D maps can have different connotations.
For example, in the inner city area of the Point, some dilapidated buildings have been analysed using these maps to identify the implementation approaches, applications, methodologies, and impacts on the architectural adaptability and resilience.
At the Point Precinct, the whole set of tools was applied including transect walks, drone mapping, and community collaborative mapping. This allowed the researcher to understand the Point Precinct from the community’s first-hand experience, realising their challenges.
The resultant community sketches laid on top of the drone maps provide a rich history of the current use of the abandoned, lost, and dilapidated buildings within the Point Precinct.
The final tool used was a community model building workshop to help communities learn practice methods in construction. This was a valuable tool to test the community’s construction knowledge and the different scenarios that could be reached. This was done as part of a workshop in the Havelock informal community and then built as a prototype in the Parkington informal settlement in collaboration with the Project Preparation Prust (PPT), iQhaza Lethu and DesigncoLab.
The proposed set of tools and methodologies allow architects and built environment professionals working with communities to co-design appropriate solutions that respond to the community’s needs. Such hybrid mapping tools provide the necessary information to rethink current planning through the urban users’ lenses and allow for a more responsive urban regeneration approach. This set of tools can be applied to various contexts for different outcomes such as in informal settlements to co-design climate-proof solutions and the urban context to co-design the adaptive reuse of buildings.
We believe that these hybrid mapping tools represent a bottom-up approach to cities today, to capture the “lived” experience of space, which is something that changes constantly and adapts to people’s needs.
This research is part of a doctoral study and a collaborative project called “Building Urban Resilience in South Africa” funded by the Royal Society through a Newton Advanced Fellowship (reference NA150082).
CLICK HERE FOR REFERENCES
Figure 4&5. Transect walks with the community and collaborative mapping process. (Source: Author). Figure 7&8. The community model building workshop in Havelock and the built prototype. (Source: Author).
Figure 6. Community sketches ‘wish list’ in the Point Precinct. (Source: Author).
TEMPORAL MEDIUMS
Explorations of the University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture Unit 18 SarahdeVilliers,DrHudaTayobandNaadiraPatel
Time underpins the structures of history, and the same could be said of architecture and drawing. As held through the view of several projects at the Graduate School of Architecture (UJ)’s Unit 18, we might argue that working with time is a kind of magic undercurrent in the work of architecture. Working with time draws out the power to permit or deny access into various “otherwheres” and “otherwhens”. For architects, we posit that time sits alongside tools like linemaking, scale, and composition although often occupying an abstract and unspoken position. Studying a cornerstone in a building, a date-stamp on an archived drawing, or an erased site where a former cinema once stood replaced now by a shopping mall, all conjure hauntings of previous or simultaneous references to other things, outside of the building or space in our direct view. Following Avery Gordon, “Haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities” (Gordon 2008, 8). Here, someone working with architecture might enact the state of a “medium”, bringing into view or displacing such hauntings, planetary entanglements and associated formations of power.
In Unit 18, the research interests draw out thematic leanings towards haunting, transfer and multilayered accounts of political events through architecture within the broader pursuits of transformative pedagogy at Unit Africa System (Lokko 2017). Haunting becomes a means to reimagine political power and space in postcolonial African cities. In 2020, the Unit 18 work focused on Cairo and Johannesburg as two sites that hold varying temporalities. Johannesburg, as Mbembe (2008:62) describes, is created virtually overnight in a very compressed timescale. On the other hand, Cairo protracts deeply into our imaginations of time and age, yet faces similar contemporary issues to Johannesburg, including the negative effects of globalisation, extreme socioeconomic inequalities and ecological insecurities (Nassar 2017). Taking these contexts on with prototyping as a central methodological tool for drawing and making deliberately attempts to work with architecture as embedded in time. The prototype exaggerates a process in which design is always unfinished, and therefore open to readjustment, and shifted ways of seeing or doing later in the future. Although time is not the only frame in which we work, it is held here for a moment to view a few emergent design-research projects from Unit 18.
In stretching out the registrations of time, we are able to see hidden, unaccounted moments of city life. Thelma Ndebele’s work (2020) shows that beneath the visible, structured ordinances of Johannesburg’s inner city’s daily activities lies a vibrant if partially hidden nightlife. In little known venues, underground music and performance subcultures occupy and flourish. In a seemingly paradoxical way, the dark of the night enables a series of safe spaces for marginalised bodies otherwise rendered vulnerable to regulation and discipline in daylight hours. Ndebele’s thesis plays with time-based drawing methods, borrowing the materials of making and drawing from the music subcultures, pushing the boundaries of representation and the limits of architectural recognition. Time, here, creates an opportunity for the heterotopic binary Foucault (2008) describes – an “other” world, within, but separate to the mainstream world we know.
Considering time within an architectural drawing is not unknown: Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till’s “Increasing Disorder In A Dining Table” (1997) shows the varying occupation of space based on human behaviour, looking through three frames of time at a dining table. Framing time helps us hold traces, or haunting of former bodies, from where we can gauge resilient “typicals”, and transformations. Student Gila Abrams’ honours work (2020) pays homage to this methodology, yet chooses a Seder dinner held in lockdown as her primary subject. Beyond the table, the drawing reveals slippages of tradition
1. Triptych by Karabo Moumakwe, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg.
across time, drawing out practices as they would have happened pre-pandemic, at a much slower rate based on diasporic contextual adjustments, and layering this with rituals during the pandemic, at a gut-wrenching speed through transformations adjusted with technology. In a different way, masters student Gloria Pavita’s work (2020) films and draws slowly enacted labours of the hands in preparing food, and hair braiding. Pavita works through rituals of homemaking for a forcibly displaced group. Her drawings and film work recognise the labours in the repetition of practices from a lost time and space as a means for survival and reconstruction in the present. Several student projects also work to disturb linear or accumulative organisations of historical narratives. Working in Cairo, honours student Fathima Mula (2020) and masters student Kamal Ranchod (2020) separately take on questions of how we see the associated representational tools. Using crowd-sourced digital reconstructions (Mula) and reworking drawing mechanisms (Ranchod), these projects reveal how representation plays a central role in foregrounding particular political narratives over others. This interest in reworking narrative is also evident in Jana Crous’s work (2020), which follows the dust from building the Suez Canal to the remnant fragments of architectural palaces and buildings associated with the Suez construction. Crous understands the fragments as
representing the “accumulation of time”, and power as evident in neoclassical architectural form. Her drawings of dust and decay destabilise the associated narratives of power.
These works invite disruption to singular-view accounts of events as they play out in space, questioning so-called historical truths and, in so doing, opening up new projections of future imagined spaces and alternative spatial politics. In 2021, the unit turns to look at “future hauntings”, looking at how cities and their spaces have imagined themselves in their futures. Whether taking on architectural viewing frames or ways of seeing architecture, spatial archives, or the surface or image of architecture, the nature of the temporary and permanent, fast and slow, night and day and before and after offer fascinating frames for articulating how we encounter multiple asynchronisms throughout architecture and the current urban spaces we occupy. It is with interest and anticipation that we might look forward to how this design research may deepen and widen as the work of Unit 18 continues.
CLICK HERE FOR REFERENCES
2. Form Follows Fantasy by Thelma Ndebele, GSA Unit 18, University of Johannesburg. Johannesburg.
QUESTIONING MUSEUMS
One architectural practice is helping museums and exhibitions to transform and become more inclusive Nabeel Essa
OFFICE 24|7 ARCHITECTURE was established in 2002 and has worked on over 35 museum and exhibition projects. The practice has unique curatorial and design skills in combining spatial understanding with new ways of interpretation. The practice critically and spatially reimagines museums, exhibitions and architectural projects, and curates and designs to engage, empower and, in the making, to transform. Through experience in working with museums, we see the need for museums to shift from housing problematic and exclusionary displays of collections to become spaces of inclusion and engagement. This shift away from the notion of museum as archive
allows for the experience of embodied narratives. Museums need to offer spaces where we can imagine transformations. The new museum must be a space of unmaking and unbinding history.
In the local museum space of paleo-science, the task of engaging the content is complex as explained by Professor Esterhuysen: “Resistance to human evolution in South Africa has resulted from a long and complex history of racism and inequality buttressed by both science and religion”1.
TACTILE AND INTERACTIVE DISCOVERY
At the Experience Lab in Maropeng, the usual body to exhibit relationship is literally and performatively destabilised. The visitor is given agency and can directly interact with the content. This is a conscious design strategy to start to unbind the constructs of problematic historic narratives.
Experience Lab is a playful and abstract reconstruction of a generic cave formation of the kind found below ground at the Cradle of Humankind. The innovative architectural abstraction allows this creative artifice to become an edutainment experience where the science laboratory meets and conflates with the nearby sites of paleo-science discoveries. Breccia, casts of well-known fossils, objects from a cave wash-in are all embedded in the landscape with discreet prompts and labels inset into the floor panels allowing for an explorative experience where the visitor finds, collates and forms a narrative understanding of
the workings of palaeontology. The project blurs the digital with the physical, entertainment with education, allowing a unique exhibition experience of tactile discovery that is not intimidating.
The project was shortlisted in the museum’s category of the World Interior News Awards and awarded the Pretoria Institute of Architecture Commendation for Architecture.
To reorientate museums, they need to be dynamic. The new museum must not be static, it needs to be flexible and able to shift and change as required. This idea is demonstrated through the flexible design of exhibition case “rooms” at the Maropeng Fossil Gallery. The design relies on large exhibition cases that offer changing exhibitions and programming, and multiple curatorial voices. Since we have completed this space, it has hosted many different exhibitions from South Africa’s dinosaur discoveries to the story around the discovery of Homo naledi
At the University of the Witwatersrand, we were involved in an exhibition to house the rock engraving collection at Origins Centre. We avoided focusing on anthropological studies and offer the entire collection as a resource for visitors to unpack. The editorial voice is thus reduced giving visitors, students and scholars space for interpretation. The plinths are largely kept away from the concrete walls to create constructed landscape islands. The rocks are organised onto floating steel platforms of varying heights and cantilever that allow for easy forklift access and rearrangement. Each rock has a label displaying the archival reference number and also has a tracing of the engraving to allow visitors to identify the often faint images. The exhibit holds the bulk of the collection as an open archive, allowing visitors and scholars to engage the engravings beyond a fixed curated experience.
The All From One travelling exhibition, for PAST (Palaeontological Research in Africa) won a Loeries bronze award for exhibition design. It uses the dynamic form of a DNA double helix structure as inspiration. This accessible, outdoor travelling exhibition sculpturally connects genetics and paleo-science with the social message that race is a construct, scientific evidence about our shared human origins conveys a message of unity, we are all from one.
In the same way as museums need to be rethought, so does the notion of the architectural practice. OFFICE 24|7 has formed through finding itself on the margins of architectural practice and having to invent and construct ways of working and a process of taking vantage from the margin as perspective and from the overlapping of disciplines.
The practice overlays an understanding of art with the disciplines of architecture and exhibition design. We have many years of experience and extensive knowledge and understanding of the display of art, interpreting heritage, curating culture, thinking around notions of memorialisation, and working with marginalised histories and in projects
reassessing the past. We work in the in-between, between art and architecture, between curator and architect. Our skill is to weave disparate and complex intersectional threads into a cohesive spatial narrative that is forward-thinking, relevant and meaningful.
We align with projects and clients who actively fight for social justice. We design against racial, gender and LGBTQI+ injustice, inequality, prejudice and discrimination. Through embodied experience of difference and otherness, through the lived experience of racial injustice, we aim to recentre narratives that are outside of the hegemony.
2. The Experience Lab, Maropeng, Cradle of Humankind OFFICE 24|7 Architecture and Digital Fabric. @papercut_za. 3. The Fossil Gallery, Maropeng, Cradle of Humankind OFFICE 24|7 Architecture and Digital Fabric. @papercut_za.
THE SUSTAINABILITY OF MEANING
Silence, light, and other lessons from inner-city Durban Garryn Stephens
“Just gimme some truth [...]”3 – John Lennon
Silence and Light 2, in Durban? Try walking in the melodic chaos of the Grey Street periphery, until you find yourself in the courtyard of the Islamic Juma Masjid (Fig. 1), or the vestibule of the Catholic Emmanuel Cathedral (Fig. 2) a few metres away, and silence envelops you, all in the light and shadow of the stark sun in the subtropics.
Having had a predominantly suburban upbringing, despite a hazy few years in the microcosmic hustle and bustle of Chatsworth, Durban South, I had no real engagement with the city of Durban – or “Town”, as the adults around me referred to it. It was the place we only drove through when we needed to visit a family member, buy consumables that were at the time unobtainable in the developing suburbia of the north, or attend Emmanuel Cathedral for Holy Mass. I would look out the car window and witness a degrading fabric of built and social density and intensity that was both alluring and repulsive – the images of a post-apartheid condition that I was yet to understand. In undergraduate architectural school, the first tangible and informed encounters with Durban took place. Places like Warwick Junction, the Grey Street Precinct, and the inner-city grid of dynamic relationships between the main parallel streets, with the arcades or passages cutting through them, the density of buildings, people and cars, sounds and smells, hopes and fears – all enlivened my understanding of a dynamic spatial field, a place, steeped in complexities, tensions, and meaning
Date unknown). Retrieved from https://www.kznia.org.za/durban-city-guide on 11 October 2017.
What is ”meaning” in the frame of spatial experience, in architecture? Sociologist Stuart Hall (1932–2014) discussed the making of meaning through discourse and communication, possible through language 3. But language is not just linguistic. Form and space speak. Hall’s concept described a necessary clashing of sorts, a push and pull, a tension between opposites: a possible synthesis. Seminal architectural/urban theorists like Christian Norberg-Schulz, Kevin Lynch, Juhani Pallasmaa, and even philosopher Martin Heidegger have explored existential meaning and perception in architecture and space. Meaning is crucial in the built environment, both influencing it and influenced by it. Yet, among all the postindustrial, technological, social, environmental, and political progressions and tensions prevalent in the contemporary world, let alone in the post-apartheid city, the question of meaning seems irrelevant. The current zeitgeist searches for sustainable and innovative solutions to the human being’s inhabitation of (and relationship to) the physical environment. It longs to sustain physical, material, and quantifiable reality, but what of the metaphysical? What about meaning, or even death and a beyond? Dare we not speak of it? Must architects only consider the scientific or mathematical (or economical), while a hunger to know more about all aspects of reality gave rise to those exact fields? The subject of architectural design is, ideally, the human person, and roughly 84 per cent of the world’s population identify with a religion or as religious 4. The religious question, often dismissed in modern discourse, asks the same questions as architecture: How do we live in this world? And, if we are moving forward, where are we going? What can be learned from the religious perception of space? Religion encounters space with the same tensions as architecture, aiming towards heaven (the ideal/unrealised), yet is required to be rooted in reality (context, people, time, and gravity). So here is a series of tensions: between earth and human (the physical), and heaven and God/Being (the metaphysical). If we can trace our thoughts back to Stuart Hall, meaning might be found here. Our thoughts can go back even further, to Martin Heidegger, where this idea finds its foundation. His philosophy of the “Fourfold” – on the earth, beneath the heavens, contingently human/mortal, but moving in time towards the beyond, the unknown or God5 – defines the intersection of these four tensions as “existential space”6 (Fig. 3, Fig. 4), a term well understood in architectural theory. In other words, the physical space where an individual experiences existence more fully. Religious space tempers these tensions.
Figure 1: The allure of the inner city. Grey Street Juma Masjid, Durban, South Africa. (Image by Roger Jardine.
But what does this mean for a post-apartheid city, whose concerns are explicitly tangible, material, technological, social and environmental? Yet, in the same city, the adhan7 still resounds, and the cathedral bell tolls. In the same city, Muslims and Christians, Hindus and Shembes, social workers and the homeless, all cross paths (even if in tension). Can the problems of the South African city be solved only through the quantifiable, the logical, the notational, the scientific, the sociopolitical or the economic? Have we become so beset with the physical and material world, that we forget the metaphysical, immaterial, and ethereal world, which captured the imagination and existential experiences of “archaic” civilisations long before us, not to mention how it sustained their cities? A deeper acknowledgement, engagement, and translation of the ethereal, of man’s search for meaning8, does not mean abandonment of complex and contingent reality, but a direct collision with it. It is only within the intersection of the Fourfold, that existential space is found. It is within these tensions and contradictions of the city, between sacred and secular, tradition and innovation, chaos and order, physical and metaphysical, that meaning might be found. Perhaps the request being asked of architects by the human person is similar to John Lennon’s: “Just gimme some truth”. If there is anything to give through architecture, or anything to sustain, it might be meaning.
Fig 2: Aerial view of Grey Street Precinct. Foreground: Emmanuel Cathedral and forecourt transition to silent, shaded interior; Background: Denis Hurley Centre, Juma Masjid, and Durban skyline beyond. (Image by Angela Buckland. Date unknown). Retrieved from https://archello.com/project/denis-hurley-centre on 15 April 2021.
Figure 3: Interpretative diagram of Martin Heidegger’s Fourfold (Illustration by G Stephens. 2021). Figure 4: Re-interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s Fourfold, based on religious space in Catholicism, prepared for UCT MArch (Prof.) Project. (Illustration by G Stephens. 2021).
TEXTILE IMAGINARIES
Materialising soft spatialities within Afro-Indo spaces in Johannesburg
Johannesburg, since its inception in 1886, has always had a rich narrative of transition and adaptation, created by its history of displacement and continuous migration chronicles. South Asian immigration from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, paralleled the movement of Africans from the diaspora and neighbouring African countries, adding to the myriad of migrant identities and demonstrating the
articulation of social narratives, cultural practices and everyday rituals within the city. These spaces form a stage for the social lives of the objects and people that characterise the built environment. The cultural exchange and co-production of these objects reflect the multiplicity of local and immigrant identities and are shaped by the long histories of regional to global networks of power and trade documenting the stories of African, Indian Ocean trade, and European exchange. This can be seen by observing, in particular, the nature of trade through Afro-Indo hybrid spaces and their soft spatialities, particularly through the medium of textile.
Amina Kaskar
1. Ethnographic drawing of A. Moosa Blankets on the corner of Helen Joseph & Ntemi Piliso Streets (Kaskar & Thokan, 2020).
categories of Western and non-Western, modern and traditional, and hard and soft architectures. The nomadic and socially dynamic nature of textile, with its multiple cultural influences and social histories, offer an understanding of the cultural production of spaces in which they occupy. As a historic artefact and performative tradition, textile provides insight into the spatialities associated with diasporic communities, intrinsically belonging within social and labour networks, microtransactions and community organisations.
CREATING SPACE
THE NOMADIC AND SOCIALLY DYNAMIC NATURE OF TEXTILE OFFER AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF SPACES IN WHICH THEY OCCUPY.
Diagonal Street with the splendour of its colours, textures and smells enshrouded by ethnic blankets, fabrics and African paraphernalia demonstrates the various encounters of the built fabric with migrant imaginaries or “otherness” through every day commercial practices. The shops are stacked floor to ceiling with blankets and textiles. Blankets hang from storefronts and ceiling rails and are stacked along the edges and centres of the stores. The walls are lined with systems of racks, inventories and displays. One has to manoeuvre oneself through stacked Shweshwe fabrics, adorned mannequins and baskets full of haberdashery and clothing.
REPRESENTING IDENTITY, HISTORY, CULTURE
These soft objects are active participants that are continuously assembled and re-assembled in myriad ways over time to produce new spatial configurations. The attached drawing captures the sedentary moment at which the textiles are folded and displayed before they progress to a new state in their social lives. Moving on to serve domestic and traditional uses and practices as they are draped and worn, representing the ephemeral qualities of space with historical links and imaginings associated with identities, contemporary aspirations, imagery, and rituals. The relationship between internationally produced textile merchandise, sold in Africa by South Asian traders for African cultural functions challenges
Within the public commercial realm, as well as the interior yards and domestic spaces of the Ark and Carmel Buildings, we see evidence of textile used as a form of agency in the way that people appropriate their spaces as a way of creating microarchitectures to facilitate specific cultural and everyday ritual practices, as well as hawking activities. People adapt found space through transitory spatial configurations, appropriating space in inventive and unassuming ways. The lightness and mobility of textiles allow for it to be handled, shaped, and stacked, erecting make-shift structures that quickly accommodate people’s needs. They create their own territories using umbrellas, mats, hanging partitions, canopies, mobile carts and even the clothing on their bodies. This creative use of space is a response to lack of access to space and frustrations with heritage laws protecting the buildings that hinder renovation and change. Unlike permanent spaces where investment accumulates in land or bricks and mortar, textile provides important investment and value within the built environment as compensation for the lack of access to other instruments or resources. Spaces are created and defined through soft architectures that add a temporal layer to the city allowing for multipurpose and flexible areas.
Textile as an interpretative category in the making and reading of the built environment challenges us to find new materials and methodologies for documenting and designing for the ephemeral and unpredictable moving parts of the city. It is capable of learning and evolving in time, devising an adaptive strategy responsive to evolving contexts, but subverting boundaries places on communities existing in unauthored spaces in the city. This introduces new names or categories that don’t currently exist in traditional architectural epistemologies, but are created by the soft modular systems that are a common practice of the site.
This text is part of a larger body of work for Amina Kaskar’s PhD entitled: Afro-Indo agendas in Johannesburg: South Asian female migration to South Africa and the shaping of urban space.
TEXTILE PROVIDES IMPORTANT INVESTMENT AND VALUE WITHIN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT AS COMPENSATION FOR THE LACK OF ACCESS TO OTHER INSTRUMENTS OR RESOURCES.
IS SACAP READY FOR PUBLIC INTEREST DESIGN?
Despite the efforts of a few brave pioneers, SACAP continues to resist transformation
Dr Carin Combrinck
Architects are seen as the “super creatives” of society and are therefore viewed as thought leaders in addressing society’s grand challenges or “wicked” problems, according to Fllorida (2002). In South Africa, these challenges have become particularly acute in the sociospatial domain over the last few decades and currently show no signs of abating. In this context, there is a curious absence of architects, either by way of policy inclusion across the wide array of housing and planning policies, or by way of professional leadership or activism regarding sociospatial justice. Instead, merit awards and current TV documentaries continue to reward professionals for service to the super-wealthy in exclusive residential or commercial estates.
Heated debates around the transformation of the profession will only become meaningful once architects assume the responsibility and accountability for becoming the changemakers our society needs by stepping out of the comfort zone of corporate service and engaging mindfully with the man in the street. This approach to urban citizenship underpins the growing field of public interest design, which is premised on the practice of engaging people in the design process. Public interest designers are committed to engagement, public participation, the facilitation of democratic design decisions, and advocate for an issue-based approach to problem-solving (Abendroth & Bell 2016).
South Africa is not without its pioneers in this field. Respected architects such as Kate Otten, Carin Smuts, Peter Rich, Jo Noero and Heinrich and Ilse Wolff are among those who have forged ahead, often against the grain of conventional practice to undertake meaningful and complex work in service of marginalised and voiceless communities. Young practices such as Fieldworks and 1:1 Agency of
Engagement are bravely undertaking public interest design projects, often under harrowing circumstances and with minimal support from either government or the private sector. These are the heroes of the substantive and meaningful transformation that our profession so desperately needs. Schools of architecture across the country are attempting to develop curricula that can prepare their graduates for meaningful and skilful engagement with complex layers of stakeholders. Examples of such programmes can be seen in UCT’s Imizamu Yethu platforms, UFS’ longstanding projects committed to earth construction, CPUT’s Live Build programme, the Wits Yeoville studio, UJ’s Marlboro and Ruimsig studios and UP’s Unit for Urban Citizenship. Community engagement in design studios has been criticised in the past for thoughtless, often patronising and superficial engagement (Oldfield 2008), causing more disruption through their involvement than contributing meaningfully. Over time, however, there has been a continued effort to improve the overall skills of community action planning and co-design as the basis for the regenerative design processes in the interest of the public good.
Despite the relevance and significance of such skills, there has been no transformation in the narrow focus of SACAP’s outcomes, reinforced during final-year examinations that are mostly overseen by practitioners upholding the status quo. Over the past two decades, I have served as internal and external examiner on numerous panels where, without fail, whatever efforts have been made to challenge the status quo, the verdict always rests on the complete design and technical resolution of a large and complex building. Whether students have engaged meaningfully with stakeholders through participatory action research, community action planning or co-design, all of these processes are flattened out as “informants” to the design of the building, whether that would be the appropriate resolution to the issues addressed or not. Research documents that could stand alone as academic outcomes are often
dismissed or viewed with disdain as a byproduct of the spectacular 3D rendering of a building. It is not uncommon to hear practitioners in final-year exams complaining that architects are not social or political scientists and therefore should not attempt to engage in this complex domain. Till (in Karim 2018) reminds us that when architecture gives up its social and political agency, it surrenders itself to other controlling forces, such as developers or corrupt government agencies. Rather than encouraging graduates to be the changemakers, our subservience to SACAP’s professional criteria continues to hold us in check and in service of existing power structures. Most disheartening is to hear young graduates’ accounts of how their proficiency in this domain is rendered meaningless once they enter employment, where they are expected to serve as soul-destroying “CAD monkeys” in service of private wealth, thereby upholding current social and political power relations.
We challenge our profession at large to take up our rightful role as the “super creatives” of our society, to step out from behind the walls and razor wire of urban enclaves and to step up as urban citizens in service of our society. We need to review the role of our academic learning sites as thought laboratories and earn our accreditation through innovation rather than compliance so that we can all contribute towards the continued evolution of this profession. By embracing public interest design as a valid professional option, we might be able to take the first step in this direction.
1. Plastic View 2, by Salome Wessels. 2. Plastic View 3 by Chris de Bruin. 3. The drone image (Plastic View 4) is from Delani Kriek.
PROMOTING THE USE OF PRESERVATIVE TREATED TIMBER
PROMOTING TREATED TIMBER PRODUCED BY SAWPA MEMBERS
WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER
Now is the best time to reposition the profession and help members strengthen their businesses and deliver professional service, writes Charrisse Johnston, FASID, LEED AP, Associate AIA Chair, IID
After a career as an interior designer and director of an architectural firm in Los Angeles, I moved to South Africa in 2018 with my Capetonian architect husband, eager to start a new chapter in my life. The past three years have been incredibly eye-opening: I’ve seen our profession from a different perspective, that of humanitarianism and problem-solving not merely purveyors of beautiful objects and materials and the latest trends.
The COVID-19 pandemic has driven that point home. Globally, people have spent more time indoors over the past 12 months than at any other time in history, and are realising how much interior spaces affect their mood, health and productivity. Now is the time to reposition our profession’s image and redefine our value. These days, given the resources, practically anyone can put together an Insta-worthy vignette. However, to create spaces that look fabulous and make occupants feel safe and comfortable and
help them to have a better lifestyle and balance, while not costing a fortune, requires a trained professional.
Last year has proved that we can’t anticipate the challenges ahead and to ensure that we’re prepared for whatever might come, the IID is dedicated to helping its members strengthen their businesses and keep up with the latest design. As long as we listen to, learn from, and collaborate with each other, we’ll not only get through it, but we’ll thrive. And by extension, our clients will flourish as well.
For more information: +27 82 891 6308 national@iidprofessions.org.za www.iidprofessions.org.za
VOICES OF THE UNHEARD WORDS
Howhard...isittohear .…theunspoken Lindy Schibl
Voice 1 (V1)
We are taught integrated development, rural upliftment, sustainable planning, and implementable solutions –presumed to be a constructed masonry … but what of the social/cultural condition?
V2
Proposed the opportunity, provided the community, attached political expediency, authorised the expenditure – took on … a degree of responsibility!
V3
Called all parties/role players to the table to explain the way forward ... using the principles of cohesive/ multifaceted advancement – groundbreaking experimental but progressive.
V4
Embraced the moment/opportunity … here is/was a chance to realistically manifest the speak and to walk the talk and vice versa.
V5
whispered quietly … How ... what kind of a framework is there out there?
V6 replied … use rationality, intuition, a basic organisational tool of an organogram
V7
Pirouetted, fluttered like a papillon, as
V8
drew lines, circles and traversed the canyons and crevices, while V9 purports to create bonds/pledges/promises.
V10
Grapples with the vehicle of cohesion … collaboration.
V11
Refers to time as being the element of essence – the need for apace deliverables.
V12
Responded.
V13
Sketched, researched, debated, designed, discussed, created, built shapes ... forms from malleable paper, clay, electronic modelling! … applies inherent familiar expertise/understanding/skill … , technologies, justifiable knowledges – learned over decades … teaching and relinquishing a vested body almost genetic coding to a team of avid apprentices …
V14–17
Notes the prevailing, and importantly, “the situational” conditions and geographical/climatic limitations.
Embellishes the schematic of the location, envelopes/
integrates the facilities, endorses existing and proposed, modifies – upgrades ... creates new rites of passage, homogenises the landscape, contextualises the rural urban sporadic sprawl, relocates, repositions – enhances … dusting the muddy periphery with a feathered fineliner Takes a chance … reproduces 3D imagination … into plan, section, elevation on 1D paper.
Is armed with a roll of paper under arm
V18
Is Critique … throws the book … and bellows use the prescription, the tried, tested recipe … scoffs at apparent irrational spatial/substitute decisions ... how could the establishment cages be rattled – by nonconformity of regulations/normality?
V19
I told you that – predictably – no space or place for creative ingenuity inherent, intrinsic
V20
Cap in hand ... it’s back to the drawing board
V21
Harvests a withered character … one who had dared to whisper and articulated profound ostensible insanities.
V22–23
Cries expediency ... rewrite, assign to the conveyor belt in the production house. Appreciates the commitment of the professional team –rubber stamps …
V24
Launches with great political/community fanfare.
V25
One angry young cadre is heard to be saying … what do you know of/how to do community development !!!!? alluding to gender and race.
V26
Remarks ... you are speaking to the trenches of a cold war ... the bones have been thrown … this sangoma speaks a new language my son ... us elders have waited many sunsets …
V27
Is not phased and determinedly ... reams of paper later.
V28
Calls for … tenderers to attend a site briefing in a very remote location with limited resources. Yet set in a location that predictably in the future could become an inspirational nodal beacon.
V29
A very eloquent convoluted deceptive tender is awarded!
V30 Is dazed.
V31 Is silent.
V32
Documentation is produced in record time; contracts are signed in a flurry, there is a collective hive of activity.
V33
Arrives to set out the buildings.
V34
Stops work ... due to … no public deceptive participation … with the tribal land authorities/communities.
V35
Didn’t you listen?
V36
Silently treads on the morphology of the anthropological socio/political/cultural dynamic ... of the untrodden vestibule/vessel.
V37
Closes the door.
V38
Fathoms the dynamic.
V39
Hastens to undo the misgivings.
V40
Remains silent … pontificating.
V41
Bustles away the cinders and reignites ... gathering up the vestiges and semblance.
V42
Pays the iMvulamlomo
V43
The imphepho smoulders … deceptively
V44
Opens up the agenda ... qualifies the processes and procedures.
V45
Earth is moved/shaped/graded/recreating a clinical scape.
V46
Pegs are placed … scored against a barometer.
V47
Waits in the sidelines.
V48
Hundreds of carefully manufactured bricks arrive and are dumped as favellas in a medieval collunarium.
V49
Reflects.
V50
For expediency, site officials/offices/get established – a rabbit warren village is established.
V51
Asks won’t the influx of workers upset the negotiated? ... sociomedical equilibrium, travestying the ravages, which had recently been conquered.
V52
What do you expect?
V53
Slowly the built forms proliferate … materialising as imaginable vehicles for hosting platforms of deliberation that have key determinates ... scholastic/social/ development/clinical/ – the recipe now evolves into a cake.
V54
Contractors swarm as busy bees …. the local economy booms … periphery roads are constructed … a path is being carved for the future …
V55
Then disaster hits, the long-awaited rains – bring a drought, the cattle are blighted, child-headed households
are devastated – food resources!!! water is tanked to the construction site and to the community. The contractor is behind on completion date.
V56
Gently reminds … we told you water is a precious commodity; you needed to decide …
V57
Reminisces that the landscape had been designed by others, to harvest the water off the land – in sufficient quantities – to enable a year-long survival for all.
V58
So why did that voice say… remove the harvesting component from the building design, why did the agri-business also get removed. Rules can get broken by spoken word ... but are the informed heard.
V59
Informs all that the V O lists are exorbitant, subcontractors aren’t paid.
V60
Murmurs in a slumbered tone … that the contractor is ruined.
V61
Does pick up sticks … Buries the bones and races to final completion unphased by the delays.
V62–68
Frowns … all in the spirit of textbook knowledge – what did you presume he joists? – implementation of new/old for new ways of thinking – he chirps ... did you really believe you could metamorphosise?
V69
Site hand-over … occupation … this is not architectural design you didn’t design cupboards for the residential units
V70
Yes, we did … it was a unique researched solution but consultants are not allowed to speak interdepartmentally.
V71
The pages of the rule book are torn, worn, dusty and are the gospel – according to norms, realities … precast in stone.
V72–86
Procedures … policies … bureaucratic standards… beleaguer community/project accountability … there is resistance to diversity ... well-oiled cogs churn out acceptable … boring … sedate … manifestos for change ... there is resistance to chance, change and challenges … are all castrated ... circles aren’t square … question why not … find reason for the undoable.
V87
I say … how then can we lead our next generation into the gates of sustainable creative design solutions that can relay bespoke stories … in the face of new crises?
V88
I am no guru … for my and my ancestral colleagues’ sins … I tried.
V89–99
Listen so you hear … speak so you are heard … look so you can see … observe smell … touch… grow ... dig –archaeologically … yours is the gift of creating … don’t waste it.
V100
This is my ‘tectural’ geographical/archi/ anthropological/ social/cultural/political/planning ... metaphor for you to create a new paradigm.
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