Boukin by University of Pretoria

A RETROSPECTIVE INTRODUCTION

BOUKIN

ISSUE 1

JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE

NOVEMBER 2015

Disclaimer: The view expressed in articles are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the University of Pretoria. Although the University makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of the content of Boukin, no warranty is made as to such accuracy, and no responsibility will be borne by the University for the consequences of any actions based on information so published. Authors may have consulting or other business relationships with the companies they discuss. Copyright of all material, including that provided by freelance writers and photographers, subsists in the University of Pretoria. Articles may not be used as a whole without permission of the University of Pretoria. Articles may be freely quoted from in part as long as full attribution is given Boukin, South Africa. For more information please contact Boukinjournal@gmail.com or arch@up.ac.za.

Cover Page : The Three Churches and the Square Ilze Mari Wessels 2014

CONTRIBUTORS Patricia Theron

Masters student of Architecture, the calm, steady voice of reason and seeker of truth through all mediums and our inspirational, hard working editor in chief of Boukin.

Ilze Wessels

Honours student of Architecture and chaotic collector of waste, city commuter, photographer and explorer, also the visual editor of the Boukin.

Mikael De Beer

Masters student of Landscape Architecture, wild and free one who enjoys climbing trees and building things, writer of articles and drawer of places, and our Boukin technical advisor and manager.

Stephen Steyn

Part-time lecturer at Boukunde, poetic speaker of things, dreamer of architecture, writer of fictions and places, and our feature theorist and thinker.

Letter from the Editor

The idea for this journal arose from a conversation which took place late last year during the final months of the Honours year. The discussion was on the possibilities of what a normative position for our Department of Architecture could be, given the diversity in focus between the various years of study, our experiences in practice, and our perceptions of the state of architecture in a post-‘94 South Africa. Through all of this, we wondered about the role that the Academy has to play in making a contribution to a more suitable architecture, relevant to our context. The School has traditionally taken a Regionalist stance, focussed on the appropriate use of materials, response to climate, and the exploration of a series of forms that have become ‘indigenous’ to our environment. There is, however, a vast disjunction between the attitude of the School and the claims that have been made for public buildings in the Gauteng region over the last few years. In search of answers, our presentation of this body of work attempts to show diverse expressions which could contribute towards the reconciliation of the various informants that impact on what architecture is in this country. Here we have presented a variety of themes dealing with the history of our School, current student work and departmental research, as well as critical explorations into our context with a look at specific perceptions, current theories of architecture, and a focus on examples of built work which pick up on these perspectives. From these fragments, we hope, with time, to be able to construct a more clarified view of the attitudes held by the School, as a body, and the work produced; and also finally how this is (or isn’t) a response to the current architectural climate in South Africa. For now you will have to piece together these disparate contributions for yourselves, with time and the evolution of this journal, perhaps these threads will form a composite and more comprehensive understanding of our position, our role, and the contributions that we may be able to make to the future of our country and its built environment. For the moment, let this suﬃce as a platform for creative expression and for us to ask relevant questions. To all those involved in the production of this journal and to all those who contributed, we thank you!

Patricia Theron Editor

Letter from the Head

The senior students of the Department, or - in Archi-speak parlance, ‘School’ -of Architecture, University of Pretoria have taken on the enterprise of publishing a compendium of writing and projects to capture a year of activity and thinking by an emergent body of young design professionals in the South African built environment. These efforts always mark a moment in the life and times of emergent thinkers for the future and helps to position them as well as predict what that future might be. That it will be challenging – both locally and globally – is indisputable. What is needed is commitment and engagement. ‘Boukin’ demonstrates both and bodes well for their – and our - future. We, the staff of the Department, applaud their efforts and wish their endeavour every success. Roger C Fisher Professor Emeritus, University of Pretoria Acting Head of the Department of Architecture (2014 - September 2015)

III

A building always BEGINS AS A HOLE IN THE GROUND

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[i s s i i s s a]

contents Letter from the Editor Letter from the Head

A CONTEXT FOR DEPARTURE [1]

Some curious and colourful teachers of architecture in Pretoria’s past by Prof. Roger Fisher In Conversation with Jean-Pierre De La Porte and Patrica Theron A brief history of Boukunde by Nick Randall

THE WORK [21]

A theory of detail - Walter Raubenheimer MA[r]KING: Threads of an architecture of slow time- Justin Coetzee Selected undergraduate work

THE RESEARCH [33]

Myth: Topomythopoeia and lessons from Oxford by Johan Prinsloo An Interior designer’s bias, or why Derrida? by Raymund Königk Urbanism as a generator for Design by Marianne De Klerk Interdepartmental collaboration by Mikael De Beer

DIALOGUE [45]

Monumental Absence by Stephen Steyn Catherdral of Holy Nativity Pietermaritzburg by Patricia Theron

LANGUAGE AND OTHER CONSTRUCTIONS [59]

NBR standards by Johann Prinsloo I ban things by Arthur Barker Inner city sanctum: A language understanding centre by Mark De Veredicis

PEOPLE MADE PLACES [68]

Barcelona Trip 2015 Reflections: Coromandel, a manor in the landscape

THEORY [73]

An overview of theory in the Honours year On Critical Regionalism by Loic Barrier

REVIEW [87]

Forthcoming book 10+ years 100+ projects, architecture in a democratic South Africa by Ora Joubert

FORM AND REPRESENTATION [89]

How to write a Rothko by Georg Nöffke Cultural Heritage: South African Statues by Inge Raubenheimer

A CONTEXT FOR DEPARTURE

Drawing Exercises 1984 Erika Cronje

Some curious and colourful teachers of architecture in Pretoria’s past by Roger C Fisher

It should be remembered that before there were schools of architecture in South Africa, architecture was taught piece-meal by way of various coursework in draughting and construction at the various colleges and technical institutions. The Pretoria Technical College offered such courses and so we look to this institution for some of the first teachers of architecture in Pretoria. When Pretoria was established as a Nagmaaldorp and declared capital of the South African Republic it served a rural agrarian community who were happy with the architecture of mud and thatch. The old adage of ‘’n Boer maak a plan’ was literally true. Buildings varied in size but one style fitted all purposes – hipped thatched roofs on rectangular white mud walls – be it a home, a church or a Raadsaal. Gold changed all that; from being a nearly bankrupted country the Republic garnered the wealth of gold taxes. With that Kruger set up a Department of Public Works and under the leadership of Wierda it became the de facto first School of Architecture in Pretoria. Young locals were taken into employ to serve alongside their Dutch-trained colleagues and so learnt the skills and advanced through the ranks. The first recorded teacher in the architectural field was Jan Hendrik Hollenbach (1852-1914). He was born in the Netherlands and in 1879 he married Hermina Johanna Breyer there. They had five children. He was of the first of the newly established Departement Publieke Werken and migrated to the ZAR in 1889. He was an architect and lecturer of rectilinear draughting at the Staatsgimnasium [State Gymnasium], recorded in Longland’s Directory of 1899 as Professor of Draughting at the State Model School in his private listing and of the Mining School in the State Gymnasium. He, as with many of his Dutch immigrant compatriots, found himself caught up in the conflict of the Anglo-Boer War. He joined the volunteers of the Hollanders Corp, 5th Platoon in the South African War, then under the command of their fellow architect, Klaas van Rijsse, but he was not involved in any military engagements with the enemy. Hollenbach died in Ermelo in 1914. Pretoria fell to the British in 1901 and they immediately took over the affairs of Public Works, initially under the Royal Military Engineers, but with the signing of the peace in 1902, transferred to civilian management. As its predecessor, it served to train young architects, the most famous of these being Gordon Leith and Gerard Moerdyk. The arrangements between Herbert Baker, as private practitioner, and the Department, as the project management team both for the Pretoria Station (1908) and later the Union Buildings (1910-1914), created oﬃces where young prospective architects might hone their skills. The Federal Council on Architectural Education of the Institute of South African Architects came into being when, on January 3 and 4 1924, it held its first meeting in Cape Town. It adopted two standard courses in architecture, the degree and the diploma. For this it accepted as the model for its own diploma, the diploma course of the University of the Witwatersrand and the full course of the University of Cape Town. In the light of these decisions on standards, its executive met, in 1926, together with representatives of the Council of the Association of Transvaal Architects and the Board of Examiners, to discuss Architectural Education in the Transvaal. There were, at this time, two centres of architectural education in the Transvaal: Johannesburg and Pretoria. The Students of the Pretoria Technical College took the Diploma course in architecture of the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1925 the Faculty of Engineering of the University of the Witwatersrand had accepted Professor Pearse’s proposal that students in Pretoria successful in the University of the Witwatersrand examinations should be awarded the University’s Diploma, and later in the year that University’s senate accepted the faculty proposal in principle. Despite the opposition of the Minister of Education, the combined meeting of 1926 endorsed the proposal, and formed a sub-committee to further the matter. It was not until 1929 that the Minister gave consent, but until this formality was accomplished the teaching of architecture in Pretoria, in practice if not oﬃcially, was under the aegis of Johannesburg, as the outcome of the policy of the architectural profession. In 1929 the Central Council of the recently established Institute of South African Architects and the Chapter of SA Quantity Surveyors asked the Rector of the Transvaal University College in Pretoria to establish courses in Quantity Surveying under the control of a professional director. As a result of these approaches, a department of Architecture and Quantity Surveying was established in the Faculty of Science, under Professor Bell-John, a quantity surveyor who was the Chief Engineer of the Public Works Department. Towards the end of 1930 a deputation including Professor Bell-John and Mr Gerard Moerdyk, a Pretoria architect, met with the Minister of Education to ask for the establishment of a Chair of Architecture in the University at Pretoria. The Transvaal Provincial Institute of Architects opposed this vigorously on the grounds that the University of the Witwatersrand was understaffed and ill-equipped, and on the principle that the moves for the establishment of Chairs in Architecture should be made only through the Central Council of the Institute of South African Architects. The following year, at a joint meeting of the Universities of the Witwatersrand and Pretoria, on 4 December 1931, it was decided to centralize Architectural Education at the University of the Witwatersrand and Quantity Surveying Education at the University of Pretoria. This decision was immediately ratified by the Standing Committee of Central Council. Only in 1943 was there a transfer of full responsibility for architectural education from the University of the Witwatersrand to the University of Pretoria when the Pretoria Chair in Architecture was established. Until this time classes were conducted in Pretoria by commuting staff of the University of the Witwatersrand.

Some early personalities A colourful character is Alexander Fraser Lawrie who lived with his parents in Johannesburg but worked in Pretoria until about 1925, when he left to join Cowin, Powers & Ellis. He was put in charge of their newly opened office in Durban in February 1925 and he also taught at the Natal Technical College, instructing in architectural design. In 1926 he returned to Johannesburg and successfully applied for a job in Malaya, working in Kuala Lumpur on a three-year contract. Part of the contract demanded that he should learn to speak Malay, which he did, and was struck by the affinity of Malay and Afrikaans. A year before his contract was due to expire, the firm which had engaged him was dissolved. At the same time he received the offer of a three-year contract to return to Pretoria to supervise the building of the Pretoria Technical College for Gordon Leith who had won the competition for this building in 1926. Lawrie returned to South Africa in 1927 and took charge of the project. On completion of the job, he was appointed a part-time lecturer in architecture with WG McIntosh at the newly formed Transvaal University College in Pretoria, established as a satellite of the School of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand. Lawrie entered into private practice on his own account in about 1933, until his abiding interest in military service reasserted itself, when he joined the Union Defence Force and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Sixth Field Company, South African Engineering Corps. The army played a major role in his life ever after. Malayan culture had a lasting effect on Lawrie, which he recalled when building his well-known house in Loveday Street in Pretoria (1928), the design of which is closely dependent on Frank Lloyd Wright’s textile-block houses of which La Miniatura (1923) in Pasadena was the first. Lawrie’s house probably most resembled the Ennis house (1923) in Los Angeles or the Arizona Biltmore cottages. He himself claimed that he was also influenced by Le Corbusier. The house is Lawrie’s bestknown building. For its construction he designed a 13 inch [175mm] concrete block to which could be added where intended a textured concrete tile which he designed, made up of interlocking Malayan pictograms of the numbers six and seven, their sum being favoured by Lawrie as a fortunate number, giving the name Tigablas, the transliteration of the original Malayan pictogram, to the house. In addition, the house number is 247, the digits of which add up to thirteen. Separately cast concrete blocks, forming complete modular corners, were made to suit both internal (convex) and external (concave) corners. The interior walls were intended to be left as raw concrete and unpainted but are now painted; the roof was flat, built to a specification of Lawrie’s own devising. The design of the house, dependent on the module of the block/tile a modular system, is perhaps the first example of the system in South Africa. Although Lawrie built many other houses in a variety of styles, none approached this concept. Several of his buildings have elaborate decorative features such as the stylized bird on the Dental Clinic (RV Bird), Prinsloo St, Pretoria, executed in the brick of which the building was made. WG McIntosh’s name has also been linked to this building; as Lawrie and McIntosh were colleagues at the Transvaal University College and also collaborated on other buildings, they may have had some common interest in this building although it is unlike McIntosh’s style. Cyril Erik Todd (1907-1992) lectured for many years on building construction to artisans in the building trade at the Pretoria Technical College and to students of architecture and quantity surveying at the University of Pretoria. He was an external examiner in professional practice at the University of the Witwatersrand and for twenty-five years served on the Town Planning Advisory Committee of the Pretoria City Council. Two streets in Pretoria have been named after him, one in Deerness Township and one in Philip Nel Park. Todd was the assessor of the competitions for the Welkom Town Hall (won by Jack Barnett in partnership) and for the Windhoek Art Gallery. Gordon William McIntosh (1904-1983), born in Glasgow, he was the son of the architect FG McIntosh, best remembered for the winning design for the Pretoria Town Hall. He was educated at Pretoria Boys’ High School where he did particularly well in mathematics and science. On matriculating he studied architecture from 1923 to 1926 as a full-time student at the University of the Witwatersrand, working during vacations in his father’s office in Pretoria and gaining experience through supervision work on various houses for Gordon Leith in Pretoria. McIntosh was a close friend of RD Martienssen at Wits. In about 1929, McIntosh’s association with the University of Pretoria began. He became a part-time lecturer in Engineering at the Transvaal University College, Pretoria. He was closely involved with the development of the College through to its acquiring University status and in particular with the development and organisation of the School of Architecture in Pretoria. His career as an architect began by his being among the first of his group at the University of the Witwatersrand to design and build a house in the new style, which owed much to the International Style, for his client Mrs AG Munro, House Munro. His association with Martienssen continued with the production of a magazine “zerohour”, an elegant journal of which only one issue (1933) was co-produced with N Hanson. McIntosh continued to practice in Pretoria, pioneering several buildings there in the modern style. The influence of Le Corbusier could be seen in the block of flats Whitecrook (1937, demolished 1985, built on land where his father’s house, Whitecrook, had stood.) Gordon McIntosh was a silversmith in his spare time and on the retirement of Prof John Fassler and in appreciation for the meritorious contribution Fassler had made, his friends and colleagues presented him with a circular silver bowl made by Gordon McIntosh. After the death of his wife Sheila, he made silver spoons which were presented to her close friends. He is remembered in the Department of Architecture, University of Pretoria for the bequest of his architectural archive, containing many of the original drawings of the zerohour exhibition, for his instituting of the Sheilagh Kirtley McIntosh Prize in memory of his wife, still awarded to the highest achieving graduate in the Department. His memorial window is located in the Boukunde Building, designed by Stephanie Fassler. He designed the entrance gate pylons on University Road edge of the main campus of the University of Pretoria (now defunct). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In Conversation with Jean-Pierre De La Porte and Patrica Theron

Exploring fictions We are in the year 2015, in the now, in South Africa, and we have recently recognised the mark in time that, for us, has represented the passage of twenty years of democracy. As citizens we may have some conception of our present time in relation to our history. As architects and students of architecture we may question our roles within a new society, we may equally experience an enormous pressure to act, but we are in the dark yet in terms of our understanding of the complexity of our specific situation. To think of our cities, with their largely fictional public realm, is to touch on the unreal in South African architecture. Working in this environment, we are subjected to the interface of issues of identity and the fragmentation of landscape. We need to assimilate or ‘unpack’ a new cultural identity for ourselves. Let us imagine a closed box containing a number of bouncing balls, one could read their relationships in terms of their containment in space; their own experience of one another and their environment would be limited to the specific positions of their interactions, arising from the point of contact made with a surface or another ball. This point of contact produces an experience and it is from the accumulation of these ‘moments’ that a limited sense of all surrounding interactions, is formed. This limited access to the larger picture virtualises experience, in accepting this situation there is a recognition of possibilities contained within that which is beyond immediate understanding. The invention of the fact, like the invention of the façade, is a recent filter of experience, in order to go beneath this layer we need to learn how to reconfigure our perceptions of the relationship between what we understand as elusive and what is immediately obvious. To understand the city is to understand the workings of power through form, in an on-going negotiation various archetypes of form communicate the city as a political entity, these representations of form occur endlessly in art and in architecture.

... My art is based on this purity, on this philosophy of nothing - but it is a creative rather than a destructive nothing... The cuts, or rather the hole, the first holes did not signify the destruction of the canvas - the abstract gesture of which I have been accused so often... it introduced a dimension beyond the painting itself; this was the freedom to produce art by whatever means and in whatever form - Lucio Fontana

In the following interview, Jean-Pierre de la Porte tries to respond to my questions about different ways of conceptualising the political, natural and cultural environment and the interactions which take place within it. Within the many different models we construct of our urban experience, we come to see the city as an expression of identities, we are face to face with exercises in identityformation, as they are expressed throughout the city, and we see the energies of power relations as they operate at a larger or smaller scale. From this dynamic, our vision is reformulated continuously as part of a design process. In questioning before we act, we end up with fragments to reassemble, our jigsaw stares back, its disarray frightening and apparent. To disrupt and rearrange forms, to alter the existing with new insertions into context, gives a strange power to an external condition of which we have limited understanding. It begins to stare back at you so that you become the receiver of strange insights occurring below the language radar. This same process can be traced in the art of Francis Bacon and Lucio Fontana, in the work of the neo-rationalists Aldo Rossi and Massimo Scolari, where the questions surrounding the design process are opened up through an operation - a careful incision, a slash, a distortion perhaps – shifting around the known, re-using and repeating in such a way as to refine subtly, these expressions of an eternal search. The void in our work is exposed, as the unreal and the unpainted become ways to reach beyond. Slavoj Zizek describes the total embedding of fiction within reality, so that any attempts at the creation of authenticity within design must reconcile the mask or persona of the façade and the nature of spaces which are formed from the inside, by those that must inhabit them. Left: Photograph of Lucio Fontana. Above : Fontana’s Spatial Concept

PT: I’m trying to understand the city as a political landscape, where you have various ways of establishing power. This can take the form of increasing privatisation (the modern city is not bounded by city walls but internally freedom of movement is increasingly restricted in the sense that the capitalist exercise has resulted in hostile environments that exclude the many while incubating the few), the monument (these have unstable meanings as they always used in support of the power of their current inhabitants, so that a structure like the Union Buildings has changed in meaning over time) and the city as a panopticon (increasing surveillance from CCTV cameras as well as the ubiquitous digital environment and the internet, oﬀering instant connection at all times). The production of space for the present and future begins with a raw material that is already not a neutral territory. You referred in the afterword of 10+years 100+ buildings - South African architecture since 94, to the absence of a public realm, saying that “post 94 architects have each acquired the ability to work like dramatists inventing characters - client, user, public and nation personae – that nobody has seen before but which everybody will soon come to see themselves in.” In addition to the invention of a public, much post-94 public architecture has presented a themed return to an Africa of the past, referencing what are seen as original themes contained in structures such as the Ruins of Great Zimbabwe, which are utilised to donate authenticity to new projects. In the search for an architectural language, in the absence of a public, we revert to representation where meanings find it diﬃcult to inhabit purely fictional devices, so that public architecture becomes more and more private – buildings recede from their audience in order to preserve their purity. These ‘architectural virgins’, hiding behind their own shy skirts (facades), actually cast the public as a kind of perversion – inhabitancies, access, use – these are threats to the image of a pristine and overly sanitised environment which favours exclusion behind the pretence of hygiene and control. The city will have authority regardless of what is put into it, in Guattari’s description of the archipelago, the sea is the ‘common’ and the islands arising from it imbue that common even though they are individual expressions. So the search for appropriate representations will always unveil genuine matters regardless of the claims for architecture and whether or not it is ‘free’. Architecture invariably sets up boundary conditions, whether through the use of walls or facades, spaces have an edge, which usually separates people and activities as well as reinforcing hierarchies; transparency is an illusion which presents a lie of inclusion. To continue with the archipelago metaphor, the sea, as containing content, belongs to the realm of origins while the island, which could be something as fragile as a raft, is what we might regard as a

pure discipline and the habitat of lived experience and assumed facts – I imagine that representation, the power to produce image, could be visualised as a balloon which is tied to this raft, it is clearly the oﬀshoot of the lived experience and any reference made to origins will have been mediated by the experience on-board the raft. Architecture and urbanism try to address these political issues without talking about it in political terms, the result can become quite muddled. The City of Joburg’s project, the Corridors of Freedom, presents an interesting dichotomy – a barrier seen as creating freedom. Furthermore, the corridor, a very important exercise in the Baroque period, has its own connotations of control, domination of landscape etc. that seem to confuse this statement even more. It reminds of the Situationist overlay for Paris, where a world of possibility is envisioned but in the end the transformative devices follow the existing Parisian routes so closely that the result seems quite conservative. JP: Well the question is how one works with that situation: as a rising architect, almost all of your access to these issues is mediated by other people – established architects, city planners, fund managers – a thousand and one different go-betweens. It is not enough to call to action because the minute you act, you find yourself within a huge negotiation around stakes. In a classroom a corridor is inert like everything else in architecture, in a boardroom it stands in for actions and gives them permanence - it fails or succeeds to make profits for an investor, to lower transport costs or to vindicate a policymaker. In this way every part of the built environment becomes a reason for putting expertise into play, the city assumes the role of coupling human and non-human agents, of helping such agents to act more easily upon each other. This design of action through action, upon action, gives life in that city the sense of being a strategy that requires strategic reactions of its own. Every city, acquires in this way, an overdesigned future whose reality seems to wax and wane as its technocrats either step past the unforeseen or collide with it. PT: Fanon makes reference to African philosophy as a contestation of Western philosophy; this thought is continued and modified in Paulin Hountondji’s writing, where he describes the danger of African philosophy not existing in itself but being too much of a reaction. In the case of Fanon, African philosophy is given a great power in that it takes hold of Western philosophy and provides it with a critique of itself from an outside avenue, a retrospection which is lacking in the Western version. Hountondji’s warning, however, raises an interesting point: that when we expressly contest these issues, we find ourselves reformed by that original line that we are trying to get away from.

Above: Power, roots & representation collage - Image by Patricia Theron

JP: The real challenge is to stop believing that you can get away from it, that there is a neutralisation or perspective from which you can apprehend things more purely. Fanon’s books were programmatic; he did not live long enough to write retrospectively the way his idol Hegel did. I like to imagine a plot in which Fanon comes back, something like Mauricio Kagel’s film where Beethoven arrives unexpectedly in Bonn for his own bicentenary. He would not be recognized by his Ivy League followers, who expect him to be Judith Butler, and he would be fascinated by the way Afrikaners managed their version of the postcolonial condition which at some times, apart from the selfish intent, could almost have been stolen off his pages. By the end of the movie his only friend is Zizek who shares his faith in the political force of ideas from the psychology clinic and his sincere love of Hegel. In the final scene they hitchhike to an African film festival in Dubai. PT: Foucault says that as things become less and less explicit, they become more dangerous and cruel. JP: But explicit things are dangerous and cruel. Few things explicated themselves better than British or Belgian colonialism or the steps of the Afrikaner secession. The 1961 republic was the fully unpacked western civilisation in Africa -something fit for Eco or Hofrat Schreber - even down to state budgets for music, architecture and literary avant gardes concocted from up to the minute study tours and suggestions from the best consultants. Homelands were attempts to destroy African Nationalism through the force of explicitness by implementing it as caricature. The pioneer technocracies, the social engineers who displaced Britain and ruled South Africa until 1994 are geniuses at putting everything under a concept where management and money can unfold it with clarity. Our implicit is produced by an explicit that has since gone on to produce such crazy adventures as ‘blanconormic’ liberalism: the implicit in South Africa is too sophisticated to be reached by its colonial eradicators. PT: It is in a sense an overlay of new meaning onto a situation, which is what the Situationists tried to do and what policy-makers and urban planners intend with their ‘Corridors of Freedom’. But it is not just to stamp something onto an existing condition, but also to understand that the stamping will have impure reactions, which are unpredictable. It is easy to map a new way, to hold onto so-called guiding threads in the labyrinth but to understand the eﬀect on the complexity of the existing fabric is much more diﬃcult. We have new perspectives and a historical understanding of old ones, but there is no clear path between the way things exist physically and the way that we understand them. So there is already a

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disjunction in our understanding and then we come back with new forms, which are introduced into the old fabric, and it’s the interactions between those that create the possibility. JP: I wouldn’t wait for new forms because they are at the end of their life by the time they get built. Here the Situationists were right, also de Certeau who died too soon to be vindicated: it is more subversive to repurpose than to replace. Cities and their technocracies seem so philosophical because like philosophy, they work with ‘reality as such’. A technocrat induces you to build your most radical notion just to prove it gathers less reality than her alternative: Koolhaas is now experiencing this in China, and Johannesburg and Pretoria were locked in such a rivalry throughout the nineteen-sixties. Besides you can only jump ahead of your adversary in the direction of their motion, hopefully putting their momentum behind yours. This demands less innovation than a type of imitation, assimilation and refinement. The design and redesign of strategies has no left or right because both prefer redesigning their way inside of what exists. There is no new queen to place in the beehive to order the confused bees: critics, NGOs and sadly even academics still dream of the ultimate exposé, leveling unanswerable accusations, new facts or knockdown arguments at technocracy - but a strategy cannot be touched in these ways. It takes better skills than these to see where managers have overtaken and ‘deskilled’ politicians. Despite Fukuyama proclaiming this secret decades ago, nobody quite accepts it at face value: a committed enough managerialism will wither extant politics and cause history to vanish as a style of justifying and explaining, so it’s hard to imagine where young architects can acquire the discernment they need now, except by working in and around technocracies. The older generation, politicised through hard knocks, was cynical and took the path of punk aesthetics and ironic consumerism to reconcile with the market. They still have no hint that technocracies have razed politics on its home ground despite knowing the EU or post Codesa South Africa. The redesign, that people like Sloterdijk and Latour identify as a front of repoliticisation, occurs at the heart of bureaucracies and this of course raises horrified scorn in ageing punks who think that big helpings of hermeneutics or dialectics will bring back a critical opposition. Whoever can push the idiom of social engineering furthest in this situation has the advantage, almost every element of social engineering and alongside it, almost every utopia grew first within architecture sometime in the last three millennia and was first perfected in a colony, yet despite this architects are still waiting on special politics all of their own to arrive rather than recognise that their own tools of thinking and planning were what universally dissolved politics and heralded the managerialism that succeeds it: the

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original technocrats are tired of themselves now that architecture and urban planning are no longer the biggest managerial force in town.

out of nothing, out of freedom or the future but in reality, directly out of each other.

PT: But wouldn’t you say that secrecy plays a part in the retaining of power – there is always separation between the many and the few in a hierarchy, and this is maintained by exactly the degree of removal and of mystery that preserves it.

PT: In her book, ‘on the political’, Chantal Mouffe criticizes left wing democracy as not really being an open discussion. Democracy, according to Chantal Mouffe, is under threat from complacency and a lack of interrogation of accepted norms. Democracy, which is held together by agreement, in the absence of conflict, becomes a farce and is not reflective of the jarring and warring of real concerns. According to Mouffe, antagonism creates enemies whereas ‘agonism’, a term she has coined, creates adversaries. Agonism implies a healthy level of disagreement which is not limited to the obvious rhetoric - so how can the environment be more agonistic, does that lie with political power, is that something that lies with public space or in the relationship between the public and the government?

JP: Remember a strategy today arises to correct previous strategies, constant redesign and institutional memory provide it with the most sophisticated present, the flexibility to play in a growing game with emphasis rapidly shifting across parts. Strategies are hard to see only on account of their sheer size and minute detail. Paper tigers, like ideology, discourse or power are not what they use to keep you out of them - you can critique all the concepts, values and the apparent politics in a strategy and still be overwhelmed by its reach, institutional depth and inertia. Apartheid is like this, incoherent as an idea but endlessly fertile as a management principle, communism in contemporary China is like this and so is the apparently acephalic Post Reagan tradition of Republican America. These are strategies too subtle in practice, and in tactics, to be penetrable by ideas (which they would simply absorb and deploy from their own stronger vantage point anyway, leaving their critics dumbfounded or tainted). Technocracies do not operate inside history, where they would have to wait for impetus from something outside themselves, they don’t wait for favourable ‘conjunctures’ to absorb, analyze and act upon. They are the exact opposite of the critical historicist graduate school that only sees a mounting Benjaminian chaos at its fashionably clad feet. Technocracies bring about events by design, then amplify and carefully couple their consequences: hence they thrived in close proximity to social engineering in the 20c, where of course they produced the sense of drowning history in its own ingredients. The USSR, Fukuyamas USA, Verwoerd’s 1961 ‘overcoming’ of colonial white history in Africa by its carefully constructed double are laboratories at the end of time. Even their bitterest opponents accede to their forms in order to reach into their mode of existence and perhaps reprogramme them. Codesa refined and redefined both sides by liquidating politics to emancipate technocracy. Despite its bizarre portrayal as cathartic dialogue by the TRC, it was the clash of two highly evolved hierarchies, one to manage mobilisation for war the other to manage capital in a state-designed vacuum. Each used the other as a fully wired crash dummy. Neither aimed at anything beyond its own persistence and neither knows the other except as enemy. The one left with private ownership of the economy, the other with the task of turning mobilisation into management: this seemed to produce our novel ultra-managed society

JP: It’s been a European dream that democracy, or the devolution of power to the majority, and unrestricted discussion aimed at consensus somehow go together. Jürgen Habermas is the greatest modern exponent of this view of civil society as inherently a conversation, therefore being able to reach some mutually satisfactory compromise or some kind of binding consensus through communicating. It’s this pacification of public space, which is the striking political theme in Habermas, and perhaps the utopian aspect of his thought. Whereas for somebody like Chantal Mouffe, the very problem is the pacification of these processes which she equates with depoliticization. And then she and others will go on to say that depoliticization doesn’t just happen because of the change in attitude or the change in civic form, it happens because the work done previously by politics has been taken over by something else, it’s been taken over by management and by technocracy, of which the EU is a striking example. You have this situation where management by expertise displaces politics and conversely when you restart a political process from whatever means, from antagonism, agonism, scooping together populisms into a hegemonic frame, whatever the mechanism, you will first and foremost be displacing a technocracy. That is an interesting way into the South African situation, because despite each of Foucault’s books having mapped the huge - hopeful or horrifying-terrain of normative rationality that makes the replacement of politics with technocracy possible, many architects, or more accurately teachers of architecture, have consistently uttered the most confused and unusable things in his name, despite architects being the first technocrats and the celebrated power - knowledge or bio-power – which is the hallmark of managerialism. Foucault’s works could be rewritten and brought out of the 19c in terms of purely architectural phenomena, just as we have seen Kittler overwrite them in media epochs or seen Sloterdijk

Top to bottom : Michel Foucault, Chantal Mouﬀe and Jurgens Habermas

http://pavilionmagazine.org/chantal-mouﬀe-agonistic-democracy-and-radical-politics/

write Heidegger out of time and historicism and into design and space. PT: That is what the city is said to have become, Pier Vittorio Aureli says that urbanisation was the end of architecture forming the city and the beginning of management determining the built environment. The city is now managed which is why the experimentation of the Italian rationalists interests him, how to reinsert forms, the archetypes of architecture, back into the fabric, which ones will survive and how will they interact with one another because it’s never clear. Architecture is autonomous but it is equally about the intersections, between these autonomous forms, that create new interactions. JP: When we said just now that we should not wish to throw new forms into the mix, I really had people like Scolari and Rossi in mind. There’s an old saying, never argue with a fool because he will lure you onto his territory where he is much more at ease than you and beat you. It is a lesson for architects to stand by their seemingly limited repertory, which is at least theirs and not get drawn into spatial geography, financing, engineering, ergonomic issues, green environmental drives, historicist cultural conservationist policies, which are all completely extrinsic to architecture. If you simply reimagine these kinds of issues arising around mathematics departments or the composers of music, you would see just how extrinsic they are. But somehow the blur around the institutionalisation of architecture in the university allows people to believe there are all these proximities and common boundaries with human sciences or other self-adjudicating things that seem successful only because they are too inconsequential to fail. PT: Do you think that the proliferation of connections to other fields could be linked to the scarcity of work at the moment? JP: Work is scarce but it is a managed scarcity, it’s like the scarcity of diamonds. Diamonds are not really scarce but their availability is rendered scarce by certain groupings, alignments, cartels and so on. Italy has had a gigantic over-supply of architects – it has had about one architect to every 400 or so people. Work should really be very scarce but the cumulative effect is that architecture as a discipline (and in Italy architecture is taught in a very pure sense, doesn’t derive its prestige or posterity from surrounding disciplines as happens here) has simply permeated the society and the economy to the point where Italy is the world’s leading exporter of a certain kind of intellectual property. It is a design capital of the world, it is a design leader of the world, and it’s just created a greater and greater design capacity, which has seeped right throughout everything in that society. And this is design in the ability to completely reconceptualise

materials, manufacture, social role, polemical role, aesthetic, stylistic role and political role but purely in architectural terms, in terms indigenous to architecture. So I would interrogate the scarcity, I think the scarcity is caused by architects themselves because they have been seduced away from the very powerful means at their disposal, the traditional means at their disposal, into believing that they can augment their power by becoming involved in different practices. Where of course they are lured by fools onto the fools territory, where of course an architect is not going to match the moves of a financier. PT: Isn’t this something that has spread into the way that architecture is taught, it is always something that appealed to me about studying architecture, that it seemed so wellrounded, providing access into history, the natural environment, design across the range – a myriad of other interests. My vague interest in geology was also catered for – It makes you a very good person to have at a cocktail party because you have a smattering of knowledge about very many things but little in depth. I remember you once saying that the power that architecture has lies in its ability to synthesise information and to create connections between the various bubbles, operating between cultural, natural and political spheres. Has this power of synthesis become diﬀuse in the interpretation of the architect’s role, in its interpretation by academia and in practice? Latching onto other disciplines without maintaining that speculative distance, that removal which allows you to play with all of these cards while still keeping the essential card the priority. Because what you are actually working with is on a very formal level. JP: I would add that in focusing on what is unique to itself, architecture does not have to eliminate all these other concerns, it simply has to realise that it focuses on all of them most powerfully from within its particular domain. One might say how can one focus on the nature crisis, on cultural heritage, on poverty interventions or the future of the city without becoming extraordinarily eclectic, without becoming someone who tries to master all these particular domains, but I think that view arises from seeing all of those things from within the university perspective as though they are disciplines. One very soon forgets that outside the university environment, in the market place, all of those very specific disciplines are applied to each other, to a problem or to a process at a particular point. And that point is only as good as the adhesion – you’ve got all of these disparate things being applied to produce a solution. Now architecture, design in a comprehensive sense, is that point of mutual application. And we find that even if the architects abandon it because they want to be amateur politicians, social geographers or social historians, it doesn’t become dysfunctional, it becomes

Left: An Invisible City by Massimo Scolari Right: Analogous City by Aldo Rossi

very carefully inhabited by engineers who are the next step in the ladder of a design competence, and then by social engineers, technocrats and politicians, who are another tier in design. You’ve got a general demand for the design of a solution between all these different disciplines, factors, and this huge range that is always the milieu of architecture. The way they come together is in this much-maligned notion of design. If the architects leave that seat, someone else will sit on it, but all those someone-else’s are coming in with a design competence. The architects should simply dig deeper and mobilise and become far more in possession of the massive case histories that they’re standing on, all the way back to Vitruvius’ advocacy of intended projects. Architects need to take possession of that in such a way that no one can disintermediate them from it. It’s very hard for you and I to take hold of an economic argument in a way that will allow us to argue convincingly with Thomas Piketty or Joseph Stiglitz but it is impossible for even their economic policy to find traction in a city without a design solution. Our real colleagues, people who have been carrying the flame for architects, have been the very technocrats, managers of cities and the engineers. PT: I would like to ask more about Scolari and Rossi, what was their project and what is the value in investigating them today? JP: I’ve been in and out of Italy often in the last twelve months and fortunate enough to get to know and engage with colleagues and pupils of Rossi as well as many pupils and friends of Scolari. The Italians are always fascinated that someone in Africa should be so curious about Rossi and Scolari, who they see as a very important but quite Italian phenomenon. I think one should first honour the individuals, Rossi and Scolari, and their projects, that were undertaken in very diﬃcult circumstances and not in any way obvious career or promotion gatherers. One can hardly name any other person who brought architecture back from death by banality in the nineteen-seventies like Rossi did. If you want a perspective on Rossi and Scolari today, you could parallel them with somebody like Jacques Lacan, who re-established the foundations of Freudian psychoanalysis. With Lacan there is the Rossian sense that everything is given but not in any workable order – that all you can think and be is already cast and you arrive upon this as a latecomer needing huge inventiveness and courage to organise it and acquire yourself. PT: Are you referring to the fact that we assume ownership of our own consciousness but that we act after the neurological event has occurred leaving us to interpret what we have done and in a sense moralise it? JP: Yes we do that but its not neurological as much as an effect of the media through which we

http://www.monoskop. org/images/1/18/Rossi_Aldo_A_Scientific_Autobiography.pdf

encounter ourselves and also of course architecture: speech, writing, diagrams and the exactitude that print gives to all this. Rossi navigates here by writing about recollection, putting him in a situation comparable to Raymond Roussel, where what can be said, thought and named somehow escapes what can be seen and recognised. In Rossi’s day, when architects still had some concern with the general climate of ideas, it would have been possible to evoke Saussure or Riffaterre and say that Rossi sees every architectural formulation turning around its hypogram. Scolari takes this aspect of Rossi’s thought so far that it becomes his own instrument. Scolari’s writings address modernism very precisely and run oblique to his image making, splitting apart what book culture has taught us should be somehow reinforcing. Architecture does not have its Roussel or Duchamp moment through individuals except spread in those aspects of Loos or Corbusier or Benjamin’s dusky incidental city that leave their housekeepers in the academy so puzzled: architecture as a practice, and its output, has always been on the level of the machines described by Foucault, inseparable from the manageability and regularisation of places and actions but its reflection on itself has often been borrowed or primitive until Rossi and Scolari reunited the way architecture thinks with the way it acts and exists. The last third of the twentieth century saw few unambiguously great works: Les Mots et les Choses is the massive exception, we are all in debt to its pages: Rossi and Scolari’s works are in every sense - quite literally - comparable to it. PT: That is also the thing about Rossi, about inserting forms, things that are already there in the world, that when we interpret we introduce meanings that aren’t there. Susan Sontag describes the reading of texts as the addition of meaning in order to make the raw works more acceptable to our time. If these works are already representations, in the end we have representations of representations, we loose all clasp of reality and power, spinning oﬀ in other directions into a world, which is increasingly full of noise, everything speaking to everything else to infinity. JP: I understand why you would see that as sterile. That is not the notion of interpretation in psychoanalysis, when Freud talks about the interpretation of dreams – traumdeutung – deutung is a polemical term, almost closer to palm readers or gypsy crystal balls. It has little to do with hermeneutics or the true meaning of a text or action. It’s more like the experience of finding something where is doesn’t belong or where you’d never expect it. When such experiences go on occurring you realize that surprise and repetition are closely linked. This has little to do with digging out hidden meanings but more like burying all too well known things that keep tunneling up out of their grave.

http://www.massimoscolari.it/

PT: Would you say that aligns with the idea of the archipelago, that somehow the repetition is contained in the ocean and the fragments that appear from it, the forms that arise, while each unique, are all products of the same endless process of regeneration? JP: It is more like the eternal return of the same, that heaven or hell dreamed up by Nietzsche in which architecture finally gives up the trade in novelty and diversion and develops the strength to carry the unvarying upon its shoulders. PT: You mean that you never know what is surface? In Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the sea gives rise to the images of your desires but those desires are in a way fickle and uncontrollable. That spectral image could be something that rips your life apart or it could be the McDonalds around the corner… JP: Well they’re in play before you arrive on the scene. Your job is to keep arriving on the scene by no longer imagining it as deep or hidden but rather perfectly on the surface, superficial. How do you get with it? It’s not a question of being more aware, politically correct, honest, engaged, or in with the in-crowd because as Deleuze and Guattari noted: if you are trying to get with a capitalist process, the only way you can experientially approach it is to be schizophrenic. So it is no easy matter to decide - I’m going to incorporate this into my awareness then do something about it: where would you get to grips with what never stops and is never quite contemporaneous with you, der Andere Schauplatz, as the mystic psychophysicist Fechner put it. PT: If these forms are endlessly repeating and if they are drawing from the same sea, they may look diﬀerent but they are drawing from a collective. In painting, artists like Lucio Fontana and Francis Bacon must be dealing with the same thing – simplification or dissolving as a means to get behind representation, cutting through to expose something beyond. The cut and the dissolving are linked; they are two ways of perceiving inside and outside. JP: How does one connect Fontana to Bacon? They are both irritable users of American abstraction with its insistence on media specificity, pure opticality that always hangs on the edge of collapsing into form and all the other great things that Greenberg correctly saw in it. In Fontana’s case he brings the medium to foreground by slashing the canvas, ingeniously, defining the point where the colour and the cloth can do no more together and, so to speak expire before our eyes. A key to Fontana is his lifelong love of somewhat sentimental ornament: that is the second way he intersects with architecture apart from his framing the void. With Bacon it’s different, almost from the opposite direction he pushes abstract expressionism

to yield up a tale of actions and events - it is not very useful to describe this as figurative, any more than in de Kooning. Those who, in the eighties, latched onto the example of Beuys students emulating Bacon and mistakenly thought it was a postmodern franchise in Kollwitz and Kokoshka can now only hide their naiveté as eclecticism. PT: I would like now, to consider the world’s preoccupation with sustainability in architecture. As architecture is a means of excluding nature and the elements, the view seems to be shifting from an idea of a hostile exterior to be shut out, towards something needing control, or perhaps that hostile exterior is at last taking revenge on us? In the South African situation this may raise the question of how Nature has been perceived in the past and how we view it now. On the one hand there is a movement towards preservation of the landscape but on the other there is the overly sanitised environment of the city, how are these opposing views brought into a single understanding of the Nature-Culture relationship? JP: How do we see nature in South Africa? At the recent Pierneef exhibition we saw a nature that was depopulated, at the time Pierneef operated, everyone had been thrown off the land, South Africa was a diaspora. Therefore there was a motif among the colonials, that they were now indigenised into this blank canvas as though destined to inhabit it. Suddenly you would get Moerdjik churches popping up almost like surveyor’s beacons of this void, on the assumption that completely white urbanisation would follow in the wake of these structures. All these stylistically uniform, ingenious churches cropping up everywhere, almost like a Kafka fable. And of course today ‘Nature’ means riding a very expensive bicycle with your friends in some holiday resort and avoiding the informal settlement. It’s about feeling good, paying extra money for your coffee for a two rand carbon credit for children in Ethiopia, which is the way that capitalism has reformulated greenness; these are ingenious fantasies of marketing, like buying immortality by eating organic trout. On the other hand nature needs to be managed and in order for it to be managed, it needs to be brought out of a political process. The resource crisis will have to be managed carefully by civic management, and not by the private sector or soon Bill Gates will be renting us oxygen. It will mean the public sector getting involved in the management of nature, hand-in-hand with various scientists, hence a form of technocracy. Technocracies might become highly refined, no longer around the social engineering motif of managing people but around the management of nature, around the common conditions. One would hope that gets taken care of outside the orbit of commercial interests. Look at what happened with potential for common good like bandwidth, which is completely befuddled by the number of private interests running through it, government should

Above: Descent into the void, Bacon & Fontana collage - Image by Patricia Theron , Left(previous page): Triptych by Francis Bacon

users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/GinzburgMorelliFreudHolmes.pdf

nationalise the ITC industries because the right to communicate, transact and have information should be a citizen’s basic right, how does that sit with the fact that we have to rent space in a communicational sphere and the software to occupy it? PT: Is architecture involved or only peripherally? How does collecting water on my roof help? JP: I think that architects are involved in those matters the way in which priests are involved in disease. I think it’s relatively simple to sit down, maybe with architects and with policy makers, and approach the current consensus on how to do this. It would be a very simple matter to work out all the ways in which a building or a structure, a designed artefact, can be useful and then just legislate that. It’s no different to the setbacks regarding light: Scolari said that the ordinances shaped New York far more than any architectural thinking, and I think that the real impact of the environmental lobby will be through ordinances which are perfectly clear, easily revisable and perfectly imposed –therefore they will cease to be a resource for architects to play funky variations on. And architects are poorly advised to reinvent themselves through those kinds of concerns because they are as out of their depths there as a meteorologist would be in designing a façade. PT: I wanted to ask more about the symptom, usually when you have flu and you go to the doctor you will be told that nothing can be done, that your symptoms can be reduced but that the fundamental and underlying cause can’t be treated – so we tend to see the symptomatic as being unimportant, uncomfortable but having a lower status than the underlying causes. But in the case of our discussion, the symptom is extremely important, it is actually more important than the underlying. JP: The kinds of things we deal with almost never have deep and meaningful strata underlying them but seem puzzling only because we regard their superficiality as banal. In an attractive and almost toylike way, Wolfram showed that genuine complexity is reached after very few iterations of a simple rule on a two dimensional surface. You can infer from such experimental mathematics that the symptomatic is always underlain by something vastly plainer than itself and not by exciting depths. This complex surface is of course also the state in which we encounter most things and processes in our lives and the level on which we first begin understanding their consequences, properties and managing them. There is a famous essay by Carlo Ginzburg, a contemporary and compatriot of Rossi and Scolari and in many ways their exponent albeit without ever mentioning them. Ginzburg, a famous historian, perhaps by way of reflecting on the nature of his craft after the collapse of historicism,

writes about finding one’s way in the incidental, the banal, the obvious and overlooked, by using clues and traces, the forensic disorder on the borders of thought and the senses. He creates a triptych of Giovanni Morelli, Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud as three thinkers who recreate the identity of an agent from next to nothing, from the despisedly incidental. In Morelli’s case, the true author of a painting, in Holmes, the author of a crime and in Freud, the unconscious insofar as it authors our daily blunders, vain sufferings and all our dreams. Ginzburg is almost perfectly devised to appeal to hypochondriacs- those among us who set greatest store by symptoms (Holmes was almost certainly hypochondriacal, accompanied at every turn by his best friend, the doctor and always needing cocaine and retreats from polite company, Freud was quite similar)- yet the thrust of Ginzburg’s work is to show how capricious it is to be concerned with profundity when you could become more engaged with detail instead, and this is of course the lesson of his famous subjects as well. PT: What about the transformation of the industry, it is happening slowly but the architectural degree and the professional environment are very exclusive, it’s expensive to study and seems to be restricted to the elite ‘family’. It is diﬃcult to penetrate but it may be shifting… We already touched on the ‘africanisation’ of architecture in this country and the farcical aspect and limited precedent this usually involves. JP: If you look at the equity index developed in Professor Keshlan Govender’s report, we are looking at the university demographic having parity with the national demographic in 40 years time. So the Govender report should be one’s baseline for evaluating transformation; it’s an interesting competent, very technical and un-emotive document. The issue of africanisation seems to me really a completely pointless decoy because the major africanisation that one associates with liberation, national liberation movements and the achievement of a postcolonial status, all occurred in this country from 1910 onwards and effectively ended in 1994. It occurred in the hands of the first postcolonial society, which consisted of the Afrikaner. So when people read Ivy league treatises on the post-colony and they see all these traits of postcolonial societies, it’s easy to imagine that this is what is happening now, somehow expressed in the whole debate about the Rhodes statue, being unable to slap a white, Cecil the lion and so on but nothing could be more mistaken. What happened in South Africa is that all of the steps of postcolonial process, colonial devolution from British sovereignty to a Republic, happened in the hands of a particular small group as if they were miming this process while they initiated a total break from a colonial power in 1910, before almost any other independence movements. All of the characteristic processes of postcolonial societies were precipitated,

Top: Turﬀontein kerk designed by Gerard Moerdijk Middle: Luckhoffkerk designed by Gerard Moerdijk and Wynand Louw Bottom: NG Ladysmith designed by Gerard Moerdijk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlUKcNNmywk

undergone and tightly managed by the Afrikaners; the indigenisation of styles, institutions, a certain kind of 20c nationalism, in fact every postcolonial processes was applied and very successfully developed against the British. The Afrikaners really were like placeholders in a pure postcolonial space. So by the time the ANC liberates the majority from this experiment, everything that one could mention in terms of a postcolonial theme had already been explored and played out once. And interestingly played out in the same way most independence scenarios would play out, think of India and Brazil, in modernizing terms. So we are endowed with a modernistic infrastructure and an ultra modernistic society, the question of coming to terms with the oppressive South African past is really a question of coming to terms with Modernism because that past achieved oppression and unrestricted capitalist growth, by separating it from rights, and engulfed the merely colonial politics of the British, and other arrivals, in utopias of managerialism. Countries like China, India, Singapore and increasingly America, don’t see democracy as a condition for free markets any longer but rather as an option or even a threat to future capitalist flexibility. The Afrikaners pioneered and perfected this style of value management long before the 21st century in which China globalized it. So we have a very rich history if you like social engineering. To say that one is going to offset this futuristic frictionless plane, for free markets minus democracy, with a decorative return to the Zimbabwe ruins is cynical. Simply from the way the early public buildings, post-94, rolled out, the present retreat of architecture, and the built environment professions, from transformation is predictable. The inappropriateness of that whole phase, the immense disregard for public engagement of any sort – that’s why I wrote that piece many years ago to say that the architects gave themselves a good conscience by creating a fantasy public, culled together from various academic motifs, social histories, spatial geography, art history and identities, whatever the theoretical fever of the day was, in order to say, well I’ve taken you into account. It rather reminds me of Lacan’s definition of love: love is when you give someone who doesn’t exist something you don’t have. And I think that sums up that phase of public buildings.

http://kaganof.com/ kagablog/2009/07/04/ architecture-before-the-public/

A properly transformed profession will come about, less from the efforts of its vaguely mandated representatives, than from understanding and allying with the public sector that manages all cities and infrastructure. Some futuristic colonial minorities understood this rapport very well in the 20th century, when such public administrations were in fact, cadres of Afrikaner expert managers and brought about some fascinating and autonomous experiments, particularly in Johannesburg, which became a kind of white oppositional utopia or a miniature America. Of course with the introduction of rights, it was naïvely assumed that architects and architectures, from and of the vast South African majority, would emerge to fill, the now vacant opportunities left by the retreat of all pirate regimes. Naturally the opposite happened, as ex-colonials reinvented themselves into developmental facilitators, NGOs, professional intermediaries, outreachers and proselytizers - in short enviving the sly colonial role of missionaries but this time moving much faster, without God. Transformation will come

Top : The Fun Palace by Cedric Price , Below : Archigram’s Walking City Below: Jean-Pierre and Patricia during the interview. about from outside this deadlock, by increasingly counterpointing the norms developed by 300 million people in SADC with the endlessly over-explicated colonial standards, that somehow enjoy such a vigorous afterlife in South Africa, the self appointed exception. The academy might help, rather than hinder this, by shedding its 19th century self-accrediting skin and finally breaking through to genuine polytechnic models, which could provide architecture with an incubational capacity and the ability to manage needs and resources internally, and with research programmes, worthy of that name. People of my generation can still remember how astonishingly fast the Soviet Union crumbled: in the same way the inflated overrepresentation of whiteness will crumble as soon as it is noticed that whiteness (in the sense of some Malcolm Bradbury inter-discipline called White Studies) is all too easily severed from its only supports - Westernness and Modernity, which now, of course, are experiments belonging to the majority and its transformed technocracies. ------------------------------------------------------------

A brief history of Boukunde by Nick Randall

Above: Original Interior of Boukunde

Time and Meaning Boukunde is more than a building and more than a collection of students or lecturers; Boukunde is an embodiment of the ephemeral passing of those engaged in the discipline of architecture who must reconcile the possibilities of design with their point of reference, their department of architecture. The innate conflict between the production of architecture and ‘produced’ architecture, does not necessarily align with collective opinions of a constantly changing academic body, seen as mechanisms marking a progression of time. The building, what many believe should be a polished gem in a prime position within the plethora of built context on the main campus of the University of Pretoria, seems to adopt a lesser status here, relegated to a rather peripheral location. At a glance, Boukunde as an object within the landscape, is defined by its hardened edges and austere massing, yet the students and alumni are deeply attached to the thickened northern façade, as well as its intimidating and yet connective atrium space, and its wood-panelled lecture halls. To understand Boukunde as an object alone is to attempt the futile; Boukunde can only be understood in the plural forms and events that gave rise to its current iteration, namely, a glass box subsequently encased by an outer shell which transformed it. The reasoning behind this duality needs further explanation before the product of this duality can be understood.

There and Back Again: While the department seems today inseparable from its physical manifestation, there was a stage during which the school existed only as intellectual property and was entirely nomadic, migrating between Pretoria’s CBD and what is today the main campus of the University of Pretoria (Botes, 2011).

Following the proclamation of the ‘Architects and Quantity Surveyors Act No 18 of 1927’, Transvaal Universiteit Kampus (TUK) began offering classes in Architecture and Quantity Surveying in 1929, under the intellectual umbrella of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Under the tutelage of Professor Harry BellJohn, the department first opened its doors on the ground floor of the Klubsaal (Club Hall) building, a Gerhard Moerdyk design completed in 1936. The Department of Building Science, known as ‘Boukunde’ in Afrikaans, could not maintain the status quo of a department shared by Architecture and Quantity Surveying for long. The following year, after discussions with Wits, it was agreed that the duplication of functions between the universities was untenable. It was thus decided that from 1932 the Department of Quantity Surveying would remain at TUC, and Architecture would be offered solely by Wits, bringing to an end Pretoria’s foray into architectural education. It would be another decade before the University of Pretoria would decide to chart its own course in Architecture, ending its longstanding agreement with Wits. In 1943, the University of Pretoria presented its own degree in Architecture, bringing the discipline back under the aegis of ‘Boukunde’. The department was relocated from the Klubsaal on Main Campus to the Buitemuurse Gebou at 239 Vermeulen Street, closer to the CBD. In 1955, the School moved once again to the Kerry Building further down Vermeulen Street. Two years later the department made its way back to main campus, finding a place in the newly completed Engineering Building, designed by Architects Meiring & Naudé (Artefacts.co.za). Once again this tenure was brief, as no more than a year later the department found itself split between the Klubsaal, housing the majority of the department, and the then new Engineering Building which had retained the First Year Studio. This nomadic behaviour finally ended in 1959, as the department found a permanent position in what was to be the form of a doublestorey glass curtain-walled structure, located on the southern periphery of the campus between the Weather Bureau (currently housing the department of Communication Pathology) and the then Department of Physical Education (Botes, 2011).

An Architecture Department Designed by an Architecture Department Boukunde, the Department of Building Science, was designed by Meiring & Naudé Architects and completed in 1960. At the time, it was described as being “[t]he most demure Modern building on the campus ...” (Greig, 1971). However, the glass façades defining the style of the modern building did not react well to the context of a Pretoria climate, making the temperature variations almost insufferable at times. Similarly, the positioning of the department in relation to an increasingly busy Lynnwood Road, led the building to be filled with the ambient sounds of passing vehicles.

While the studios are invariably cold and perplexingly seem to grow smaller every year, the Department plays an undeniably important role in the furthering of architectural discourse within a South African context. While the building, through its edge conditions, seems to ‘turn its back’ on both main campus and the street, the focus of the building is on the cultivation of architectural thinking within its halls, rather than the advertisement of its discipline through its façades. It is not the building, at Boukunde, it is more than this, it is the academic forté of its lecturers as well as the promise of its student body that gives the Department its unusual kudos. Its corners are sensuous, its façades are mindfully deep; Boukunde has its place firmly cemented in the future of the South African vernacular.

The Modernist design of the school, while flawed for its context, was not necessarily poorly designed in other aspects, in fact quite the opposite. While current students complain about the lack of good light in the studios, the 1960 version of Boukunde had natural light which streamed into the work spaces, providing even lighting for the drawing boards. Interestingly it was not the environmental factors that brought about the much-needed 1973 extension to the Department, it was instead the substantial increase in the numbers of students, between the years 1948 and 1982 (Nel, 2011). From the original capacity, of around 180 students, the expansion saw this number upped to somewhere between 300 and 440 students, depending on how close you pushed your chair under your desk. The expansion solved a number of prevalent issues the department had been experiencing during its short tenure. The in-situ castconcrete shell served to increase the studio floor space, while providing a more temperate working environment due to the reduction in the glazed surface ratio. This also served to reduce the incoming noise pollution from Lynnwood Road. However, aside from the benefits of the structure’s modification, the 1973 Neo-Brutalist extension to Pretoria’s school of Architecture all but erased any trace of the Department’s Modernist origins. Regardless of this, the architect of ‘the then-new Boukunde’ still paid homage to many of the spaces deemed to be spatially successful, such as the courtyard at the core of the building, which was subsequently encapsulated by an atrium space, still revered and studied by many architects across the country.

Broken but not Beaten, Bent but Unbowed Since the Department’s inception over 75 years ago, architecture as a discipline has adapted to its ever-changing context. While a mental shift from what was to what is, is needed, change in the built environment can be slow. With these changes, effected in the course of time, and the passage of students through the educational system, Boukunde’s much-loved Terrazzo Flooring has been scuffed and marked by many an all-nighter, and stained with coffee.

Its corners are sensuous, its façades are mindfully deep; Boukunde has its place firmly cemented in the future of the South African vernacular.

Above: Boukunde shutterwork detail Below: Boukunde Nothern Facade

Above: Boukunde original Nothern facade

THE WORK

The Cricible Unobtanium

2014 The Cricible Unobtanium Jana van Dalen 2014 Jana van Dalen

A theory of detail by Walter Raubenheimer Masters dissertation 2014 The decommissioning of the famous Cullinan diamond mine will create an industrial ruin, perpetuating ecological degradation and fostering a homogeneous experiential environment within a scarred landscape. The inaccessible, ghostlike remnants of mining industry will not only result in a loss of functional, social and economic value but also a loss of authenticity, heritage value and spatial and experiential diversity.

extraction

The dissertation questioned the current mining rehabilitation strategy by proposing an alternative architectural solution that is resilient, and that regenerates the post-industrial mining environment while providing opportunities for new spatial and sensory experiences. An alternative approach to the industrial archetype is proposed by establishing a new experiential interface between the public, productive industry and the industrial heritage. This approach will generate new functions, memories and meaning on the site. The new architecture transforms the current mono-functional industrial archetype into an experiential, regenerative mechanism, which facilitates the remediation of a post-industrial environment.

tectonic concept The proposed architecture will define and delineate existing individual spatial identities while reconnecting them through an experiential promenade. The proposed essential oil extraction component will establish a new relationship with the extant industrial heritage while the cider-making component will investigate a synergy between industry and the landscape. The existing mining industry is associated with the destruction of the natural landscape through the extraction of natural resources. In response to this, the conceptual approach intends to invert this destructive extraction by proposing a constructive extraction and reinsertion as a new approach to inform industrial architecture.

22 screen detail 3d Louvred

Louvred screen connection details

The act of extraction is associated with deducing principles, construing meaning, to draw from and to isolate. An expression of extraction was achieved by retaining the individual identity of the components, which make up the composite envelope. The beams of the pergola are therefore not directly fixed to the column of the louvered screen but rather slide past it and rest on a channel that is fixed behind the column. This threshold between the two elements is detailed as an exposed bolted connection referencing the detailing of the No. 1 headgear. The column can now read as a continuous entity, which extends toward the sky to support the roof. Where the tectonic structural column meets the stereotomic footing, the column is â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;pulledâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; away by removing a segment of its flange, in order to emphasize it in its own right. A series of expressed and exposed structural connections create a new tectonic character without losing the individual identity of the constituent parts. eXtRActIon

Louvred screen and envelope detail sketches

insertion

Greenhouse assembly detail 3d

The greenhouse beams consist of laminated Saligna timber and are inserted in between two timber columns. The beam is then fixed in position by means of timber dowels that are kept in place by brass rounds. The ends of the beam, which are cut to the desired profile, are protected against the elements by means of purposemade copper cappings inserted over them and fixed with brass wood screws. The columns are provided with more structural integrity by means of a steel rectangular hollow section that is inserted in between them and bolted in place. This steel hollow section is then slotted over a smaller steel hollow section, which is welded to the column baseplate. The concealed fixing method of the timber louvers involves cutting a groove into the timber, which is then inserted over a steel angle screwed to the timber beam below. Every aspect of the detailing is therefore realized through an expression of the tectonic theme of InseRtIon.

Greenhouse connection detail sketches

Greenhouse detailing: perspective

MA[r]KING: -threads of an architecture of slow time by Justin Coetzee “Performativity is a fundamental part of architecture, it not only implies a specific ‘use’ or ‘program’, but also relates to a more rooted understanding of potentiality. This potential, the potential for event or ritual to unfold, which is inherent to architecture, invigorates architecture and adds impetus to the way in which we experience and are cognizant of our urban landscapes. This inherent potentiality has the ability to order visible and invisible relationships as well as the ability to influence one’s perception and experience beyond the context. This can be achieved, in part, through narrative strategies. This narratological concept - of reading, translating and influencing - borders on the theory of literature. This dissertation pursues a grounded understanding and analysis of various strategies and concepts employed in literature...”

3rd YearWork

Life happens at eye level Yvonne Bruinette, Bsc Arch, 2014

For me, Architecture starts and ends at eye level. This is the scale where architecture really meets its user, where the dialogue is initiated and the narrative or first impression is marked as either a memorable, or ephemeral experience. We consciously & unconsciously examine our immediate surroundings and absorb any details on a human scale which could mean that between the infinite and the infinitesimal, all sizes are equal but not equally important from the eyes of the viewer. With a keen interest in the constant negotiation between form and life, and between the observer and the participant, I believe that architecture should represent an innate sensitivity to time and place on both an infinite and infinitesimal scale which is accessible and construed by all.

A Spectacle of Curiosities

The travelling political school

This project investigates the temporal dimension of architecture as a spectacle of existential space and free appropriation by means of an international travelling political school which adapts, interrogates and alters the hosting ruin as a platform for architectural opportunity. This process of free adaptation and interdependence explores the post-modern ideology of temporary spectacles and responds to the experience of time and context on various urban scales as it informs continuous dialogue - as a natural, integrated process - between the observing host and the performing other. By introducing the continuous change of both use and user, and with its potential to act as a political platform within the city environment, the project encourages a continuous dialogue on a more natural and integrated level, not only between the building and its user but more importantly the participating school as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and their hosting context, the city-dwellers of Pretoria.

10m

From the top: Rendered plans, Middle: Sectional details Below: Rendered section

Crucible Unobtanium Jana van Dalen, Bsc Arch, 2014

To make architecture politically within the context of a contrived African capitalist state has many implications within ideological realms. This project is located within a hybrid fringe condition, the Edge. A state of suspension constitutes the context within which the problem, site and architecture sit in tension. The capitalist inhabitor of the condition takes part in a speculative analogue where architecture is programmed as a metal recycling plant, a symbolic gesture towards a politically and physically changing landscape. The architecture produced from this recycled fringe fabric, sets into production an arrangement of sculptural follies: this materialisation of spatiality within the trans-mutative state of being is the formal incarnation of ideology within typology . Within the consumption of architectural material, the augmentations in time and space deliver a product of a resilient nature, a de-materialisation of a condition. This participatory embodiment in object and architecture, sits in tension with its referential methodology ;a testing ground to reveal the next mutation of the African capitalist ideology.

Unobtanium

A meticulously manufactured folly, morphed out of mutated metal. The recycled ideology stands as a referential product to African capitalist ideology as it resides and mutates within the residue of a Western force. This landscape is, through this procedure, filled with metaphysical occupancies through fragments and material traces that are scattered and imbedded. This expression of speculative research into the perception of ideologies in object and architecture, as a result of western residue, becomes a provocative thought captured within the spatially experiential condition and its architectural situation, on the Edge. By process of abstracted speculative ideas the inhabitor, as a poetic gesture towards future users, is re-produced and consumed metaphorically. It is by studying these attributes that we can build and accumulate an archive of possibilities with which to develop design proposals that register the properties of the site while contributing to the creation of something unprecedented within an unprecedented condition.

Metallurgy for the mutated mind

Above: Illustration of site Right: Model of the unobtanium

The Shopping Comp 2nd YearWork

Housing Project for Hatfield Corner Park Street and Festival Street by Jan Hendrik Jooste

Jan Hendrik was the top Design achiever for 2nd year 2014. In this housng scheme designfor Hatfield, the structural formis a place where individuals interact on a social A shopping complex is essentially erected out of the surface accomplish a design of the earth, to be compared to a spiral that corresponds positively within this framewo staircase ‘growing’ out of a basement , thus human’s physical and social needs is used as a point of reference. T connecting the logi basement andwill the satisfy apartment genis that the spiritual element. above. The ontervention appears, as though floating above ground, this emphasis of the The brief introduced the concept of a small shopping centre that sp open space below as well as the spaces on the and dining. This design aimed to challenge and possibly replace t first level.

concept. My vision for the project is to liven and improve the neighb Above: Mixed media 3d representation of the Housing of Complex. Middle: Conceptual sketchesis divided by t create a link between the two parts Hatfield that for a Housing Project in Hatfield. Below: Shopping hand rendered section. Historical significance remains verycomplex important and an undeniable p even though change is inevitable and often needed. This project sho of catalyst for the area, holding on to heritage and culture in the light o change and improvement.

This design announces a complete and independent, selfdetermining whole - ‘a small world’, in response to the unique conditions and characteristics of the site itself. In architecture, the appearance of wholeness leads to the realisation of a unique and indivisible plan: works marked by integrity as well as consistency between idea and form.

There are three prominent so-called zones surrounding this particu corporate zone, the regular residents of the suburb and the transport Rissik Station. The layout of this design focuses closely on the locatio and aims to create a sense of convenience for everyone.

Hatfield

The Shopping Complex Corner of Burnett Street and Park Street by Luca van der Merwe – Streicher

Luca Streicher was one of the top design The brief introduced the concept of a small shopping centre that specialises achievers in 2nd year, in 2014. She journals in food and dining. This design aimed to challenge, and possibly replace, the typical mall concept. My vision for the project is to enliven the both fluidly and extensively during the neighbourhood and create a link between the two parts of Hatfield, which design process, and the form of her building are currently divided by the railway line. The project should act as a catalyst for the area, repecting both heritage and cultural aspects, while responding is subject to constant investigation and In the housing scheme design Pretoria, the structural form to thefor needHatfield, for change. alteration though endless pages of line out of the surface of the earth, to be compared to a spiral staircase There are three prominent zones or functions in direct proximity to the sketches which are understandable only to site, namely corporate,with residential and the transport hubapartment. at Rissik Station. basement. It connects the basement the above Th her. Despite Luca’s emotive hand-rendered The planning layout is focused particularly on the location of these zones invention appear above ground” order and the consideration of convenient in access for all. to emphasise bo style she was quick to acquire the skillas “floating below aswhich well resulted as the space on the first level. of the digital rendering, in a set of very concise and powerful Above: Image of The Shopping unique announces amodel complete and independent, self-deter Centre, by Luca Streicher punups at theThis end of the year,design these were world’,and in frankly response to the unique conditions and characteristics exceptionally small well organised, a little dauntingarchitecture, for her peers. -Kyle Oberholzer the appearance of wholeness leads to the realisation of a u (fellow student) plan: works marked by integrity as well as consistency between idea and

There are three different types of apartments integrated into this project, unique specifications:   

Luxurious apartments having a small shop on the ground floor; A group of apartments with intersecting courtyards, where residen to experience the outdoors and set up market stalls to host a small And lastly, apartments that each have an office space, stacked 29 high rise block, cantilevering over the piazza.

1st YearWork

Investigating Site: The Boys High Grounds by Conrad Venter

During the first year course students are asked to investigate objects, the self and place extensively through hand drawing. These exercises are the introductory tools for expression of ideas, meaning and interpretation of space. Condrad Venter demostrated how the quality of place can be represented in a beautiful series of sketches and studies of the Boyd High School Grounds.

is essentially erected e ‘growing’ out of a he idea is to let the oth the open space

rmining whole, i.e. ‘a s of the site itself. In unique and indivisible d form.

, each with their own

nts have the freedom l community market; together to form the 30

THE RESEARCH

Map of the Union Building 2014 Ilze Mari Wessels

Landscape Architecture

MYTH :

Topomythopoeia and lessons from Oxford by Johan Prinsloo

I THE MYTH OF OXFORD It was in the year of 2004 that I went on a pilgrimage to Oxford. Following my third year of studies, I worked as a security oﬃcer in London, really. To escape night-shift drudgery and the money-mad branded high streets, I took flight on a bus to the city of dreaming spires. I don’t know exactly why, but the city has held my imagination since I was a young boy. Harry Potter hadn’t been written yet, so I felt quite alone in my longing for a place of learning amidst gothic towers. My Oxford was, if I recollect, a picture of sandwiches and tea, wooden oars and willowing water. A picture probably formed by the illustrations of Ratty and Mole ‘messing about in boats’ and stopping for tea and cakes on grassy green shores that were diﬃcult to imagine on the dusty turf banks of brown rivers in the Highveld; a picture of dining halls with wooden thresholds eroded by centuries of feet; of the Inklings huddled around a crackling fire at the Eagle and Child with ale, talking literature and taking turns to read their manuscripts—minds searching for truth, unfettered by ‘high impact research initiatives’. It was then with great anticipation that the bus left Victoria Station at dusk, but with great disappointment that it passed, glistening there in the morning Oxfordshire sun: the fat American letters spelling out ‘McDonalds’. So it seemed that Oxford was a lie, a place—like the blue of mountains— that disappears when you reach it. It seems there is the real Oxford of congested streets and modern buildings—the place itself—and the moonlit lime-scented Oxford of Matthew Arnold, the place of myth.

II DEBUNKING THE MYTH I call it a myth because of the discrepancy between the observable, physical reality of the town and its representations. What are we to make of it?

A Barthesian interpretation

If we follow Roland Barthes and do a post-modern hermeneutic analysis of it, we might compile a collage of signs (verbal and visual) produced by an industry of Oxfordishness: Scenes of fops lazing on river banks with champagne glasses wearing straw hats; scatter-brained dons awkwardly moving from college quad to fireside pub. Those are the signs: tweed, tower, toga. Together they signify Oxford as a place of liberal learning steeped in ancient tradition inhabited by eccentric men of genius and dandies of wit. But then would come the (typically postmodern) moment when the secondary language is revealed: the myth of Oxford as a place in which chauvinistic elitism is legitimized by its romance. And so we could go on to demystify Oxford to guard ourselves against the hidden propaganda of the charade.

A symbolist interpretation

Or, we might follow a symbolist approach and try to search for the meaning of the myth by identifying archetypes also found in other myths: for example, we might say that the triad of Student-Don-College represents the archetypes of Eternal Boy (Puer Aeturnus)-Wise Old Man-Mother: the student is bawdy like Bacchus and creative like Apollo, the Don gives guidance like a Gandalf or Mr Miyagi, and the College is the fertile womb sustaining life. Or something like that.

A functionalist interpretation

Or, we might search for the functions of the myth: the myth of Oxford was created to uphold the English system of class. The graduation ceremony is a ritual that grants the participant access to Parliament. The image of the scatterbrained don was made to explain, in the absence of

Left: Apollon terroriste, Little Sparta (the garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay in Scotland), photo by Jonathan Jones,

scientific theories, the inexplicable occurrence of scholars forgetting where they left their car keys.

A Discovery Channel interpretation

Or, in the spirit of the popular definition of myth as a lie, we can bust myths about Oxford (as indeed one website does): it is not a place filled only with ‘posh’ people, lectures are not presented in Latin and there aren’t solely craggy pubs in the streets—Big Macs are peddled too. And so we can go on to seek the hidden message of the myth behind the images, look for the symbolic meanings of the myth, try to find out what it originally did (what did it explain?), or debunk it by discerning facts from fiction. And these, to be sure, will be worthwhile academic exercises. But there is one other way to look at the Myth of Oxford that may be more helpful for designers. You see, I didn’t finish my story of the pilgrimage there: after the disenchantment of finding McDonald’s and Boots (which is really like encountering, whilst reading The Lord of the Rings, a tourist advertisement for Air New Zealand), I soon found myself off the High-Street in lanes that maze through moss-grown walls that led me to Magdalene College—C.S. Lewis’s suite of rooms being one of the stations on my pilgrimage. From there I wandered into Addisson’s Walk and encountered, at the end of the garden path, a poem by Lewis: I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear: This year the summer will come true. This year. This year... This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell, We shall escape the circle and undo the spell. With the beacons of modernity out of mind, I was re-enchanted. There I felt the Myth of Oxford: a place with the vague outlines of a unified symbol wherein the bells toll eternity. The myth had no hidden agenda, nor an allegoric meaning that begged to be decoded, nor was I buying into a lie or conspiracy. I experienced it, dare I say, phenomenologically. The myth transubstantiated the stone, grass and trees. The myth had given form to the world experienced through my senses.

III MYTH AS WORLD-MAKING It is this world-making capacity of myth that can give form to the landscape beyond that which is assumed to exist independently from our perception, that I think holds value for landscape architecture. The child, who stands in his room at the window and imagines to be the captain of a spaceship staring at the starlit abyss, is participating in his world—he is helping to make it. When his father comes in and says, “you silly boy, it is just a window”, he breaks the spell and the window becomes a mere thing. The father, like John Locke in the eighteenth century, tries to strip away the contribution of the boy’s perception of the object and make him see it ‘for what it is’—that abstracted concept of a window that satisfies our lowest, common definition of it. If only the father knew that his technical, objective word ‘window’ was also once an attempt to imaginatively uplift a mere opening in a wall by means of a metaphor: Vindauga, Old Norse for ‘eyes of a building that let in the wind’. The father, as part of a community sharing language, thus too, without being aware of it, participates in making the world—he is just borrowing an image frozen in language, where the boy created it himself. A view of the world (as held by the father) that does not admit, or wish to admit, that we participate creatively in it, is one in which phenomena are seen to exist independently from

ourselves. It makes one believe that the sound is indeed there when the tree falls in an unpeopled forest. Seeing the world ‘for what it is’, goes by many names: the mechanistic (deist) worldview, modernity, nihilism, but I prefer disenchantment. I was disenchanted when the Golden Arches shattered the myth of Oxford and, for a moment, made me see it as merely a collection of buildings and brands like any other touristic town. I am quite disenchanted by contemporary landscape architecture (and architecture, for that matter) and have often wondered why the landscapes that enchant me most were not designed by landscape architects: Addison’s Walk; a beach where I stood as a child and held a piece of glass sculpted by years of thundering waves where in the gloom of stormy dusk I imagined distant lands with dim-lit inns and creaky ships; more recently, the Roman Forum with her overgrown red brick cliffs tumbling into the trodden stony paths. I must confess that in Paris I did not, as a good student should, visit Parc de la Villette, but went straight to Versailles. On reflection, these and other thick spaces share some characteristics: my experiences of them (in situ and ex situ) are akin to Sehnsucht, they emanate an invisible presence in the visible and, importantly, they do not exist independently from my imagination; they, in short, evoke unfulfilled longing and creative, conscious participation—like that feeling when reading a storybook without pictures. And it is on this latter quality that I will pursue the argument.

IV CULTIVATED PARTICIPATION The participations of the imagination in the forming of these spaces were no mere fantastical daydreams. They were cultivated participations. Just as the writings of the Inklings or scenes from The Wind in the Willows (which is not even set in Oxford) were parts of a greater myth that enhanced my spatial experience of Oxford, so too were my experiences of these other places cultivated by creative works: texts and images. My experience of the Forum, for instance, was cultivated by H. V. Morton’s A Traveller in Rome and Fellini’s films—these construct a vast virtual city that, when conjured, transubstantiates the bricks, trees and marble. Thus, external creative works save the appearances of the place-in-itself. I do not think the representations of contemporary landscape architecture cultivate participation: the graphic notation system of the discipline is rather geared towards representing the ‘place-in-itself ’, notably abstracted diagrams for the sake of analysis, realistic perspectives that communicate objective space, and vague collages that allude to meaning, but rarely define more than moods. I have therefore become interested in the role of text in the making of landscape.

V TOPOTEXTS Texts have historically played a part in the cultivation of people’s creative perceptions of landscapes: Virgil’s Georgics helped cultivate a shared Roman identity located in rustic fields; the Medieval Roman de la Rose cultivated the idea of an enclosed garden as a setting for love; during the Renaissance, the Hypnerotomachia poliphili cultivated a love for gardens of Classical artifice, which were directly translated to designed places (parts of Versailles, for example); the whole Romantic movement and British love for the sublimity of ‘free’ nature was rooted in poetry (and landscape painting); N. P. Van

Wyk Louw and other Afrikaans poets cultivated a love for the Karoo, a place considered desolate and barren in the eighteenth century by British explorers who sought, in vain, for picturesque scenery. These examples beg the question whether topotexts (allow me the neologism) can be written to complement, and even generate, designed landscapes. Following my own attempts of writing such texts and discussions with my students about the topic, I suspect that the unbridled writing of such texts too easily leads to mere subjective flights of fancy: private worlds which facilitate private participation. To resolve this egomania, I am looking at the archetypal nature of myth.

VI TOPO-MYTHOPOEIA William Blake, in opposition to men like John Locke (mentioned earlier), was vehemently vocal against the tendency of the eighteenth century to abstract the world into ‘things in themselves’, independent of perception. His wonderful illuminations testify of a man who sought to ‘make the world’, like the child at his spaceship window. In Fearful Symmetry, the literary critic Northrop Frye demonstrated that Blake’s creations were not merely the works of an avantgarde genius that envisioned the world in original and fanciful ways: His works, original as they were, are deeply rooted in, especially Biblical, symbolism. Even though Blake believed that perception is creation, he also believed that it ought not be wholly private: perception and the creative works that cultivate it must be related to the unified imagination of man—that imagination which envisions the gigantic myth of creation, fall, redemption and apocalypse. His work is therefore a balance between signature (individual genius) and archetype (the genius of tradition). Blake’s mythology, free from dulled literary and visual clichés, gives form anew to old types. In his character named Urizen, for example, we find Zeus re-imagined: the bearded old man giving law and order to the universe. Blake has lifted the veil of familiarity without abandoning an image deeply rooted in our consciousness, as we are re-enchanted when we allow ourselves to participate in the child’s creation of a window. The poetic potential of myth was also embraced by Romantic poets such as Coleridge and later by twentiethcentury authors like Franz Kafka and J.R.R. Tolkien. Picasso painted a centaur with light. The rational, secularising project of modernity was shadowed by figures like these. Their mythopoeia (myth-making) has been antidotal to the disenchanted world of modernity. Through my current research, I am hoping to propose that myth can be rescued for landscape architecture as a poetic tool, not in order to create a veil of fantastic escape from the real, mundane world, but to unveil that the real world is not mundane.

The Vale of Venus at Rousham

Temple of Apollo at Stourhead

The Ancient of Days depicting Urizen designing the earth with a compass, illumination by William Blake as the frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy, manuscript copy B, 1794, Glasgow University Library, accessed on 7 July 2015 at www.blakearchive.org.

An interior designer’s bias, or why not Derrida?

Interior Architecture

by Raymund Königk

During the examination of my doctorate, an examiner noted that although I claim to take a poststructural position, I never mention Derrida. She advised me to refine my position to avoid being asked, why not Derrida? Without delving into formal theory it must be noted that not citing Derrida could be considered as a major oversight, so why did I avoid referring to the darling of architectural theory and the father of deconstruction? To be honest, it simply was a matter of taste. I did not want to, and I did not want to because I disliked the associations Derrida evoked, specifically those with architecture. I enrolled for a Bachelors of Interior Design in the Department of Home Economics at UP in 1999, I graduated with this degree from the Department of Architecture in 2003. This represents a fundamental intellectual shift at the time in which interior design was no longer a form of homemaking but a discipline in the built environment. As an undergraduate student in the Department of Architecture, constant reinforcement was given to students regarding the interrelationship of the three architectural [!] disciplines and reminders were abundant about the unique character of this department, specifically its interdisciplinary nature. The unhappy situation emerged in which interior design was put in the closet, rebranded, and in which the architectural character of the discipline was lauded.

design: the discipline’s progressiveness, its subtlety, its scale, its intimacy, its short life, its non-heroism, its optimism, its prettiness, its coolness, its innovation, its craftsmanship, rapid change, colour and textile and material... It is more fun choosing scatter cushions and kaggel kak than counting parking bays. To get serious again, what is my scholarly position? My position as an interior designer is characterised by two components: 1.) I have a materialistic concern with physical, inhabitable interiors, and 2.) the focus of design is the process of making, transmitting and understanding meaning (as an aside, you cannot ‘make’ space). The exchange of material goods, and the commodification of their secondary connotations, plays a central role in interior design production. Making meaning itself has a material nature within the realm of objects: meaning is contained in material artefacts which is available not through deciphering but through intuitive interaction with objects. Interior design is made to facilitate consumption. Interior design is uniquely placed in the built environment to denote occupation, inhabitation and identity. These are its concerns, not form-making or structure. There is no such thing as ‘interior architecture’.

During my postgraduate studies I was increasingly driven by a sense of first differentiating interior design from architecture, and later liberating interior design entirely. Personally my leanings would always be away from the theorists who are adored by architects. I did not even read Derrida, therefore he was excluded from my thesis. When I was asked, why not Derrida?, it is interesting to note that I was not questioned on my exclusion of Kristeva, Lacan, Bachelard, Irigiray... or that as an African I omitted Fanon, or hooks... If I considered issues of representation and meaning, should these authors not be considered before Derrida? I am not concerned about ways in which interior design is like architecture – during my initial literature review my intuitive response to encountering Derrida’s name was probably to just move on. This is an unashamed bias on my side which colours my voice. I am concerned about ways in which interior design is interior design, not even in ways in which interior design is not like architecture. I love interior design, I do not love architecture. My constructions about the built environment are shaped by my experience as an interior designer. Architecture is merely there to provide the base buildings in which my discipline can find creative expression. Architecture is to interior design what a canvas is to oils. Unfortunately this does not mean that I can eliminate architectural theory from interior design, the disciplines are too similar. They are so similar that issues of similarity are really boring. There is a lot of published theory out there, I respond to that which provides aﬃnity for my own subjective love of interior

Raymund Königk graduated with a PhD for his thesis An imaginal interpretation of interior design’s methods of cultural production: towards a strategy for constructing meaning. This is presented in his capacity as a student.

Right: ‘Study of interiors lived in’ by Ilze Mari Wessels 2014

Honours Research

Urbanism as generator for design by Marianne De Klerk The design studios in the honours degree is rooted in a deep urban interrogation, resulting in design responses embedded in site, context, and social infrastructure. The year is divided into four quarters focusing respectively on urbanism, heritage, environmental potential and technical resolution; taught as a continuum in the yearlong course. Students were offered a choice of one of three sites in Pretoria, which are explored throughout the year via urban design frameworks and various architectural, landscape, and interior projects. Towards the east of the city, the Alaska settlement in Mamelodi considers informal settlement upgrade strategies. The historic Wesfort site, a former leper colony and hospital located to the west of the inner city, today accommodates an impoverished community that has appropriated the site after the closure of the hospital. The third site, which is the focus of this piece, is located in the north-west quadrant of the inner city. It consists of three areas, namely Church Square, Church Street and the block located south-west of the square defined by the TPA building; Steenhoven Spruit and the open lands around it dominated by the monumental Kruger Park and Schubart Park; and Marabastad, the frail remaining fabric of a former location that was gradually destroyed during forced removals and infrastructure development during the first seven decades of the 20th century. The studio is concerned with the development patterns, social history, and fragile built fabric of the study area. A working method was developed where the designersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; traditional focus on form, space and materiality is complimented by a concern with embeddedness in place and context, and the collective impact of the fabric on the social and economic landscape of the inner city. Church Square, the historic anchor, still holds the centre of the inner city but the fabric is gradually unraveling towards the west, resulting in three areas differing in density and coherence but which all display characteristics of stressed social and urban fabric. The studio was further enriched by participation in two multi-disciplinary research projects with the Community Orientated Primary Care Department (COPC) of the Medical Faculty looking at street medicine and the Contextual Ministries Centre of the Theology Department, who is conducting a study on homelessness.

A research methodology was developed to inform the urban design frameworks developed over a three-week period in quarter one. Students were deeply immersed in the context via site visits, mapping, desktop research and analytic research to help them develop the parameters of a framework and to eventually identify and define various design projects. In the process, mapping became a critical analytical as well as generative design tool. Traditional topographical mapping focusing on land use, density, urban form, environmental conditions, open space, and movement patterns were complimented by the mapping of development patterns of destruction and decay, homelessness, empty buildings, movements of refugees, the territoriality of taxi drivers, categories of unsafe spaces and criminal activity, polluted areas, waste accumulation, and informal trading. A complex pattern developed that allowed students to develop soft infrastructure design approaches to address the often seemingly invisible layers of marginal activity and stresses of the inner city. A number of strategies emerged from this very detailed reading of the multiple layers of the inner city that was thematic rather than a formal categorization of the physical layers of the urban fabric. Students reconsidered their understanding of dwelling, which was redefined as living in multiple spaces scattered over a fragmented and disrupted area rather than the act of residing in a single space. In the process, spaces and buildings are re-appropriated and reused by the inhabitants of the inner city. Thus the goal is to reinterpret various modes of dwelling to heal and strengthen the inner city. Within this framework innovative urban design strategies and projects developed that looked towards urban generosity, considered adaptive re-use of existing buildings, sensitive infill, retail developments that consider formal and informal as a continuum, active streetscapes and an investment in public life; and the introduction new architectural typologies to support the taxi industry, the homeless and informal traders to creatively solve urban problems. This focus on soft infrastructure, complimented by more traditional urban design strategies, places the focus on enablement within a multi-disciplinary approach to urban design and regeneration.

Above : Photographs of homelessness Right above: Diagram of the Western Quadrant of Pretoria from the Honours Studio, CBD Group Left Bottom: Urban Density Studies by Honours studio 2015 Right Bottom : Site mapping of exisiting building typologie by the Honours Studio 2015

Inter-Departmental Collaboration by Mikael de Beer When the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Architecture Honours class was asked to join a Master’s student to assist in research, I chose an old acquaintance to whom, I thought, my network of contacts may be of use. This network-thinking set in motion a whole collaborative process between Architecture and various other Departments in UP. Setting up meetings between UP’s Family Medicine and Architecture Department led to an invitation to a brainstorming session held by the Centre of Excellence (jointly hosted by UP and the University of the Western Cape) in Food & Nutrition Security. I eventually joined a research group using community-oriented large data collection techniques in poorer parts of Tshwane, which led to the focus of my Master’s Degree. We asked “who are the food insecure and what can be done about their situation?”. The resulting collaboration between the Architecture Department’s Honours programme, my Master’s dissertation, the Departments of Agriculture, Geography, Family Medicine, Human Nutrition and Consumer Sciences resulted in a rich and inspiring time.

Masters Research Landscape Architecture

interacting with other fields of study; agitating the comfort zones of the Architecture Department’s pedagogy. Working with real-life situations can allow for interaction with the potential users and this is a great way to prepare for practice. Having researchers, professors from other fields, and inhabitants of your site attend a proposal critique can be intimidating but ultimately rewarding. There were occasions when Alaskan inhabitants would simply disagree with parts of proposals and this allowed for solid decision making and iteration.

The first significant aspect of collaboration was the initial hesitation of individuals to join. This was mainly due to the expectations of the research group. There was not significant room in the research project’s requirements for spatial research yet it did overlap with many of the Honours curriculum’s interests. The Architecture Department joined and committed to the mapping of the research group’s site: the eastern-most informal settlement in Mamelodi named Alaska. What we as a Department ended up contributing is an interesting point of debate. The students could map qualitative aspects and see the big picture but this is not always useful for geographers, policy developers, doctors and consumer scientists seeking specific answers. Architects need to get to a proposal quickly after a short period of exploration, whereas other, more quantitative fields may not have to propose anything - just make a singular statement. We couldn’t make any solid claims. So what role do architect’s play in inter-departmental research groups? The architecture students were the only research group that has presented findings and created proposals thus far. One can argue that it may not be too useful in a quantitative sense but, as a research project leader pointed out, the proposals were tangible and sparked further research goals. We are synthesizers, Jacks of all trades, and we assimilate well from a broad field of interest. We try to see beyond to possibilities and create positive proposals using our imagination. Not many train their imagination so fully and work on international research projects developing national policies. It should be noted that the Architecture Department’s view has been shifted through interacting with the other departments. It is used to working alone and approaching issues through a broad but singular lens. The students benefited from

Above: Photograph by author of ‘Gathering’ Left Bottom: Photography by author of a group meeting, Below: Site drawings combined with digital drawing by the author Opposite Left : Photograph by author of Mamelodi Site visit Opposite Right : Site drawing by the author

There were consequences and as the late Prof Bakker said, “serving two masters is easier when they want similar things”. My Masters’ trajectory became stuck in research and behavioural sciences as I wanted to produce something that a thorough researcher would. This was not beneficial to the design process and the project leaders set me free of my research-team responsibilities. My Master’s is based entirely in the real-world and after looking at some of the very esoteric and speculative proposals Boukunde allows for, I wondered if having such a grounded project was stifling. Acting HoD, Prof Roger Fisher, succinctly corrected my thoughts with “Nothing limits creativity”. Personally speaking, the best aspect to collaboration in the ‘‘real world” is the fact that the work we do is immediately significant. Food security issues are in some views more pressing than putting architectural energy into commercial work such as Menlyn Main or another Atterbury development. A year spent creating a dissertation which may help your city and possibly your entire country is a year well spent. This would not have been possible without collaborating across departmental and knowledge gaps, without sharing experiences and without being willing to listen to society’s voices. A sincere thanks to Carin Combrink who coordinates the Architecture Honours year and agreed to integrate the research project with the Department’s programme.

DIALOGUE

Building detail by Stephen Steyn

Monumental Absence by Stephen Steyn “What response do rocks and stones make to the poet who urges them to speak their true names. As we might expect, it is silence. Indeed, so self-evidently foredoomed is the quest that we may ask why it persists so long. The answer is perhaps the failure of the listening imagination to intuit the true language of Africa. The continued apprehension of silence (by the poet) or blankness (by the painter), stands for, or stands in place of, another failure, by no means inevitable: a failure to imagine a peopled landscape, an inability to conceive a society in South Africa in which there is a place for the self.” (Coetzee 1998, p. 9).

Since 1999, when Nelson Mandela first called for the establishment of “a people’s shrine, a Freedom Park”, the layering of concerns and expectations on the project has resulted in what is, arguably, among the most complex and ambitious works of public architecture in South Africa’s history1. The conspicuous absence of patrons at Freedom Park, however, produces an awkward silence and raises critical questions about the responsibility and limits of architecture in the creation of a South African public. In order to commemorate, symbolize, and concretize the advent and development of a democratic society in South Africa, one of Pretoria’s/Tshwane’s most prominent hills, Salvokop — located directly in the line of sight between the Union Buildings and the Voortrekker Monument — was chosen to house Freedom Park. The park is designated to serve simultaneously as, “a monument to human rights, dignity

and freedom”; a “memorial to those who have sacrificed their lives to secure liberty”; a repository and interpretation centre for indigenous knowledge; a Pan-African Archive; a retelling of “3.6 billion years of Southern African history, culture and spirituality”; a “place for the renewal of the human spirit” and, a “sacred, multi-faith haven” (2015, freedom park.co.za). The park embodies its complex, layered conception through the division of the site into several primary zones that address various aspects of this programme. The zones that deal most explicitly with memorialisation and spirituality, the Isivivane (sacred space) and S’khumbuto (memorial), were the first to be designed and constructed on the eastern slope and crest of Salvokop respectively. The aspects of the programme that deal with more pedagogical concerns, the //hapo (often called the Freedom Park Museum) and the Pan-African Archive, complete the project and are situated at the northern foot of the hill where they serve as a gateway to the rest of the site.

The Representation of Freedom: At its opening ceremony, Freedom Park was tasked with the unbearable burden of service as “a monumental tribute to, and symbol of, the unending human quest for the all-round liberation which will bless the human body, the human mind and the human soul with freedom as infinite as time and space”. (Testimonial from Thabo Mbeki, 2008). Though Thabo Mbeki made this statement at the park’s first oﬃcial opening in June of 2008 (just months before he was

View of the Voortrekker Monument from the S’khumbuto.

1 - For a comprehensive and thorough report on the development of the brief, the competition and the design process read Jonathan Noble’s African Identity in Post-Apartheid Public Architecture.

recalled by the ANC and resigned as president) it condenses much of the cloud of rhetoric that has swirled around Salvokop for the past decade and a half, and serves here as a retroactive summary of the expansive, extravagant brief. This brief, and the title, Freedom Park, seem to suggest that one of the primary functions of Freedom Park is the representation of freedom. The call for a symbol representing the “quest for allround liberation which will bless the human body, the human mind and the human soul with freedom as infinite as time and space” is essentially a demand for the representation of the quest for everything or, for that matter, of the quest for nothing. In order for liberation to be “all-round” or total, it must allow everything and restrict nothing. If architecture can be defined, basically and broadly, as the self-conscious construction of boundaries, of thresholds, of insides and outsides, it is self evident that the abstract notion of “all-round liberation” cannot be represented architecturally since “all-round liberation” includes the liberation from boundaries, liberation from architecture. The role of architecture can thus only be to offer us a particular definition of a qualified freedom. This qualified freedom can be expressed in two primary ways, or through two essential questions. The first is the definition of freedom by reference to manifestations of its opposites: What are we free from? The second is the more intriguing, the more diﬃcult, and the more imperative question: What are we free to do? This is the brief hidden inside the demands made on Freedom Park. What could architecture be in South Africa? In order to deal with the representation of the abstract notion of “freedom”, or “all-round liberation” which has remained an imperative of the project despite the architectural paradox, the design makes regular references to representations of absence which serve as synonyms or surrogates for freedom. The most conspicuous, and the most successful, of these references can be found in Marco Cianfanelli’s “Sculpture of Ascending Reeds” at the crest of the hill. Developed from part of Mphethi Morojele’s initial concept for the S’khumbuto (Noble 2011, p. 240-244), its final incarnation manages to be simultaneously the most visible element of the park and a potent representation of absence. Just under 200 stainless steel poles, the tips of which are illuminated at night, trace an invisible, ascending silhouette over the hilltop – at once monumental and immaterial. It is a powerful and effective counterpoint to the gravitas and literal heaviness of the Voortrekker Monument and the Union Buildings, but at no point does it come across as frivolous. The “Sculpture of the Ascending Reeds” wields the ability to represent abstractions of freedom and absence so clearly precisely because of its status as sculpture and its concomitant freedom from the burdens and potentials of use (beyond the semantic function of representation which is, technically, use). The architecture on the site attempts, with varying degrees of success, to do the same, giving precedence to representational functions over considerations of dwelling and use. The “Sculpture of the Ascending Reeds” shares the hilltop with the S’khumbuto — a natural indentation at the crest which is manipulated into an arena and two galleries replete with “Eternal Flame”, “Gallery of Leaders” and “Wall of Names”. The Wall of Names and Gallery of Leaders serve a significant pedagogical purpose but they comprise only a small percentage of the structures on the site and most of the site is unprogrammed and, consequently, unoccupied. This emptiness lends them some potential as contemplative spaces, but this function is already well catered for by the Isivivane which, having been designed explicitly with that purpose in mind, is much more successful and makes the S’khumbuto almost superfluous as a destination. The underlying sensibility appears to be that of a separation of the sacred from the profane, and any programmed activity that ventures beyond the vaguely defined act of contemplation is here considered unsuitable for this, the most eminent part of the site. This underlying sensibility has had the unfortunate consequence that the buildings on the hilltop stand vacant almost all of the

time – awaiting rituals to fill them temporarily. The apparent desire for the purity of the sacred has had a paradoxical influence; in the absence of preconceived programming, the entire hilltop complex is currently available for hire as a ‘venue’ for about R90 000 per day and subsections of the complex can be hired independently for “awards ceremonies”, “formal banquets”, and “corporate retreats” (certainly profane activities, if not profanities in themselves). An arena of this scale could have been enormously successful in an urban context but since the site as a whole is also, from conception, subject to an insistence on the separation of the sacred and the profane, the translation of an essentially urban space to a comparatively remote hilltop has left it isolated and disused. A similar fate befalls the //hapo, the museum which hovers over the city from the northern slope of the hill and which is responsible for the retelling of “3.8 billion years of Southern African history, culture and spirituality”. Here the programming — developed with exhibition-design firm Thinc Design (New York) and Visual Acuity Limited (a subsidiary of the multinational conglomerate BB Visual Group) — is extensive, but it appears that the programme and the interior have been designed in relative isolation, resulting in a number of unfortunate coincidences. As a possible nod to the vocabulary of liberation, interior volumes are made relatively independent from the exterior object-forms through the use of a double layered skin with copper-clad plywood sheets on the exterior, and an interior layer of gypsum board. This arrangement has been used to maximal effect to create an immersive experience as visitors lose contact with the outside world and commit their attention to the displays of light and sound that permeate the cavernous galleries. The narrative designed into the building shell is that of a gradual ascent out of darkness. Enclosed spaces gradually give way to increasingly glazed rooms toward the end of the journey where, finally, a magnificent view of the city is flanked by a compilation of various African tapestries and video screens looping what appear to be representations of South African youth culture with strong American inflections. If it is indeed intended to read as a projection into the future (which the building’s overall trajectory strongly suggests) it is extremely conservative. The ‘darkness to light’ metaphor is also unfortunate because the simplistic progression from dark to light does not correspond to the history displayed on the interior. Pre-colonial histories are given little more than a cursory glance. And while the display cabinets in the precolonial sections of the museum are barely labelled at all, the sections dealing with the history of colonialism and apartheid is completely overwhelming in its verbosity, bombarding visitors with text by the square metre. It is possible that this is intentional and that it is an allusion to the oppressive bureaucracy that managed those systems, but it does little to remediate the conditions of a skewed history created by the systems under critique. Overall, then, the overly-familiar “dark histories” are brightly illuminated and precisely those histories which should be brought to the surface are erased through excessive synopsis (in the first few galleries) or drowned in prolixity (in the subsequent galleries). The focus is, unmistakably, on the safer question; what are we free from? And when forced to respond to the second question, as at the definitive end of the route, the answer is conservative. Still, had the content of the museum responded to the plot of the building (the gradual ascent from darkness to light, from notions of enclosure to notions of openness) it would have had to deviate from the historical chronology with which we are familiar, but this may, in fact, have improved the experience.

The Political Landscape In the opening salvo of Philip Brittan and Gary Van Wyk’s essay Erecting Capital Icons, we are given a witty summary of the political importance of a building’s height when they write that, “[i]n the vertical world of Homo erectus, height ‘naturally’ enhances presence. Erecting a high-rise raises this presence to symbolic heights — what is signified is power” (1998, p. 253). The //hapo takes this “naturally enhance[d] presence” to the next level — primarily through its location, but also through the treatment of its facades. The hill as a site acts as a substitute for high-rise construction, allowing for the erection of a much smaller building but one which none the less towers over its surroundings through the elevation of the natural ground level. Similarly to the Union Buildings and the Voortrekker Monument, nature is here, conspicuously, in the service of the representation of political power. What this also does, is allude to the conceptual power of a natural order, a universal desire or an historically inevitable outcome. It naturalises and legitimates power structures. This would be a more desirable quality if the political power being represented here were democratic, but as it stands at the moment (with a R90 entrance fee to effectively keep the public out2) it is that of an isolated elite. To disguise this unfortunate representational problem, the //hapo employs two powerful neutralizing forces, Style and Nature. “Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments — as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated. The notion of ‘having a style’ is one of the solutions that has arisen, intermittently since the Renaissance, to the crises that have threatened old ideas of truth, of moral rectitude and also of naturalness.” (Sontag 1966, p.18)

The adoption of a style when dealing with the production of a politically-charged work of art conceals political content. The //hapo is certainly a politically-charged work of art and, clearly, it adopts a very recognizable and established style in architecture, Deconstructivism. Brittan and van Wyk also outline some of the ways in which, during the course of the twentieth century, much of the high-rise architecture of the Transvaal suffered under an “overriding desire to possess international symbols of modernity [which] overrode practical factors” (1998, p. 253). Towards the end of the century, while high-rise construction remained highly competitive, museums rose to prominence as the preferred means of placing cities on the international stage where they “compete for well-educated citizens and foreign investment” (Polo 2008, p. 80). In the //hapo we see the fading ripples of Bilbao. The “practical factors” to which Van Wyk and Brittan refer involve, primarily, the quality of design and construction which South Africa’s industry had been less successful at imitating. But while the //hapo is exquisitely crafted (down to the detailing of the doormats), and is by no means technically deficient, its overt formal references to Deconstructivism — and to Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin in particular — places it in a position to receive a similar critique. The //hapo is effectively an instance of an international style. Deconstructivism is particularly suited to the museum as a typology since its trademark detachment of the envelope from the programmatic content liberates the exterior to fulfil its representational responsibility by allowing for the 2 - Starting from the 1st of September 2015 the entry fee has been adjusted down to R50 for South African citizens and up to R100 for tourists - the eﬀect of this change will only be evident over time. 3 - The archive building appears to have been translated from a much more banal setting. The only recourse now to fix this is to populate the entire northern slope of the hill with similarly-scaled buildings to create an urban fabric in which it will seem less out of place since it would make a perfectly adequate urban building but appears as a blight on the hill in such close proximity to the //hapo.

treatment of the exterior surface as an image. In the case of the //hapo the image is of a collection of substantial boulders that appear to have come to rest at the foot of the hill. The sensitivity of the site, its very naturalness, invites imitation. The positive value of this imitation, this camouflage, is painfully evident when the //hapo is compared to the Pan African Archive building — four conspicuous storeys of face brick immediately to the west of the //hapo3. But it is here that one finds one of Freedom Park’s most serious absences, the absence of meaning. The problem with the imitation of natural form and the use of metaphors derived from nature is that they represent additional attempts to neutralize content. In The Aesthetics of Silence, Susan Sontag summarizes this potential when she says that “[t]he landscape doesn’t demand from the spectator his ‘understanding’, his imputations of significance, his anxieties and sympathies; it demands, rather, his absence, that he not add anything to it.” (Sontag 1969, p. 18). The boulders metaphor functions on exactly this level and serves to negate political content. The assumption is that Nature is politically neutral and that, by implementing references to it on the facade, politically sensitive buildings can be made innocuous. It is also a continuation of the colonial practice of conflating ‘Africanness’ with Nature. A practice which produced, and continues to produce, the cultural space in which patronising ideas about noble, stoic natives can be unceremoniously combined with ruthless exploitation, where people could be treated as either aesthetic objects, natural resources or both.

‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’4 The concepts surrounding poetry and the poetic are widely known to have in their earliest discernible etymological traces a relationship to ideas of making. There is, for architecture, a doubling of poetic capacity since it is also widely known that buildings are not only made by us, but that they, in turn, also make us — there is poetry both in design and in dwelling. Ultimately, without a public to occupy it any work of civic architecture is bound to remain an empty gesture and though the //hapo may be well made, until it is properly occupied by the South African public it will not make well. References: Brittan, P. and van Wyk, G. 1998. ‘Erecting Capital Icons: High Rise Buildings in the Transvaal’ in Architecture of the Transvaal edited by R.C. Fisher, S. le Roux and E Maré. Pretoria: Unisa. Coetzee, J.M. 1988. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. Radix: Johannesburg. De la Porte, J. 2013. On the Future of South African Architecture. [video online] available at: <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0MDCHCCx9gU> [Accessed 16 June 2014]. Johnson, P and Wigley, M. 1988. Deconstructivist Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Maré, E. 2006. ‘A Critique of the Spoliation of the Ridges of the Capital City of South Africa’ in South African Journal of Art History, volume 21, number 1, pp. 95-103. Ndebele, N.S. 2006. ‘Against Pamphleteering the Future’, in Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Noble, J. 2011. African Identity in Post-Apartheid Public Architecture: White Skin, Black Masks. Farnham: Ashgate. Polo, A.Z. 2008. ‘The Politics of the Envelope: A Political Critique of Materialism’ in Volume vol.17 pp. 76 - 105. Available from: http:// volumeproject.org/ Sontag, S. 1966. ‘On Style’, in Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Sontag, S. 1969. ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, in Styles of Radical Will. London: Penguin. Wigley, M. 1993. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Yeats, W.B. 1996. The Collected Poems, edited by Richard Finneran. New York: Scribner Young, G. 2009. ‘Freedom Park’ in 10+ Years100+ Buildings, edited by 4 - The quote is from W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Cloths of Heaven’. //hapo is a Khoi term which translates as ‘dream’ and is, according to Freedom Park’s marketing material, a reference to the Khoi proverb ‘A dream is not a dream until it is shared by the entire community.’

Hapo facade detail.

Liebeskindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Jewish Museum in Berlin.

The Cathedral of the Holy Nativity Pietermaritzburg by Patricia Theron

Architects: Heinrich Kammeter, Norbert Rozendal and GeoďŹ&#x20AC;rey Carter-Brown Engineers: Ove Arup and Partners Main Contractors: George Black and Son Quantity Surveyors: William Slingsby, Campbell and Partners

A number of years ago, while working in Heinrich Kammeÿer’s oﬃce, I visited the so-called ‘new Anglican Cathedral’ in Pietermaritzburg. I spent my early childhood in Maritzburg but had not returned for many years, so this was really a kind of pilgrimage for me. The town itself seemed to have been frozen in time, referred to as ‘sleepy hollow’, I was privileged in the sense that this private and early memory had not been altered by subsequent development. One does not see many examples of modern architecture here and as a result the design of the Cathedral was met with general outcry by those who felt that the building would not only ruin the site of the original St Peters, but the city centre as well. The project did however go ahead, was accepted by the community and is much loved by the parishioners. It was my first time visiting it and I experienced it as a magical enclave in the heart of the town. When I returned, I interviewed Heinrich about his and Norbert Rozendal’s Cathedral design; this and the original project documentation provided the basis from which this article was written. The analysis, in symbol, of the primary structural elements was my own reading of the physical experience, an interpretation of religious architecture.

History of the project In 1976, Heinrich Kammeÿer and Norbert Rozendal won the first prize, out of the 88 entries, in the national competition for the design of the Cathedral Church of the Holy Nativity in Pietermaritzburg. They were assisted by Geoffrey Carter-Brown, who was responsible for on-site supervision, administration, project management and advising the architects throughout the process of doing the working drawings. The new Cathedral was envisaged as the bringing together of the High and Low Churches of St. Peters and St. Saviors. St. Peters, erected in 1865, stands on the site of the Cathedral and is an example of Victorian, Anglican Architecture, built out of shale with a sandstone plinth and architraves. Before the construction of St. Saviors, the High and Low churches had to share St. Peters, and it was said that the Bishop Colenso would throw a bucket of water onto the congregation, if the service ‘went over its time’.

The brief Apart from a cathedral, the design had to include a fellowship building with a refectory, small luncheon room and kitchen; a raked lecture hall for 200, a flat-floored meeting space for 400, as well as administrative oﬃces for the relevant parties. The worship facilities were to provide seating for 1000 people with vestries, a control room, a cry-room, and provision for the organ. In support of the new liturgy, the altar was to form part of the main worship space and not be set back from the congregation as in older cathedral plans. The cathedral complex needed to respond to the pedestrian street and to the Mall, between Church and Longmarket Streets, which at that stage was still in planning.

As an urban cathedral, with the life of the city clustered about it, it was important for the architects that it form an integral part of the city. Whereas the majority of the other entries treated the site as tabula rasa, the winning design retained most of the existing trees, yellowwoods and mahoganies, conserving the park, and forming a bond between city and church complex. At the completion of construction in 1981, the dome of the cathedral was exactly the same height as St. Peters, meaning that from the street it did not tower above the older structure. From the other side, the cathedral was masked by trees, and in Kammeÿer’s words, “If you wanted to see the building, you had to go in.”

Form, structure and symbolism A cathedral is built on a super-human scale and yet it is an architecture of absence and of void; the symbolic significance of the empty cross, the bread and the wine, are merely reminders of physical absence. While density is encouraged within the city, in a cathedral, it is a large and mostly empty space, which is given back to the people. The overriding intention behind the formation of the main worship space was to create a sense of being ‘contained’. The service is held within a brickwork drum, supported by concrete beams; the structural solution of the square inside the circle, linked by the cross, allows for empty space below the upper structures in the drum and for a convergence of symbolic meaning. The religious centre provides a place for congregation and worship, which exists as an antithesis to the imperceptible and invisible; the place of worship represents a point of transformation from the nonmanifest to the manifest. Spatially, the creation of this absence requires a structural solution which is in tune with the religious concept of the ubiquitous, yet invisible presence. The desire for the void within cathedral design requires great spans, and in the absence of Gothic buttressing, a structural solution was found that does not complicate the inner space by filling it with supporting columns, which would have detracted from the unified nature of the place of worship. The point at the centre of the drum is one from which structural forces diverge. The geometric purity and simplicity of the drum, gives way to an increasing complexity as one moves towards the outside: a transition of space and symbol. In symbolic terms, the square is associated with the earth and its four cardinal directions, the circle relates to the firmament and the celestial sphere, it is undivided and perfect. Just as the Cathedral must mediate between the spiritual and the temporal environments, these references in form begin to construct an additional meaning; structurally and geometrically, the square within the circle speaks of linking and connection while the cross establishes the relation between the centre, the circle and the square. In this way, the structural tools used in the support of

the roof, form part of a universal language. The cross is also the symbol of spatial orientation, traditionally cathedrals faced East-West to mark the rising and setting of the sun, situated on the rotating Earth. In this case, the cross within the drum is aligned with St Peters and with the street edge which runs from North-East to South-West. A religious centre orientates – both spiritually and as a landmark within the context of the city. The reference which is made to the four cardinal points of the earth, reinforces the church’s position in the world and its duty in the mediation between worldly and spiritual affairs. Form is influenced by belief, and the design of any spiritual place involves the weaving together of spiritual and material threads.

Light and form In religious understanding, light came before form and is therefore linked to the informal world. In architecture, light reveals form and is itself altered by surface. A duality results from the separation of light and dark. In the Cathedral, the architects considered how the walls, ceilings and floors would be washed by light. The curvilinear walls always have parts that are darker and lighter, in response to the changes of the overhead sun, which is dynamic. In the same way, the shadow patterns are constantly changing. Kammeÿer explains, “Each time a person visits the Cathedral, they are made aware of climate: climate which is a part of a higher order. Light is used to emphasize the separation of elements. Windows are purely to modulate light, this modulation becomes an expression of the window itself: the aesthetic lies in the making.” The dimness of the interior of the worship room creates an atmosphere of intimacy, allowing for spiritual focus and eliminating distraction. This softening of light creates an atmosphere for both individual prayer and communal worship. The void space of the drum is emphasized by light from the clerestory, creating subtle nuances of shade, but mostly grey. At certain times of the day, the sanctuary is lit from behind by the sun.

Communicating through detail The question that Rozendal and Kammeÿer asked themselves was, how they could set about, through detailing, to communicate a real and powerful experience while constantly relating this to the human scale? The legibility of the building became important and there is consistent communication of the connection between the different levels. The intention was to make the use of the various parts of the Cathedral obvious – this creates the variety of forms that sit within the site, where the monument and the stair are read, deliberately, as objects. According to Kammeÿer, “The whole site is the Cathedral, with its trees and its grass,” a collection of fragmented elements, like a tray with cups and a teapot - even the trees were envisaged as objects placed on the tray. In the development of relational elements to the drum, it was wondered how to break into the cylinder? The decision was that the most effective way would be to create a cube that would intrude into the space; this forms the main entrance with its heavy, pivoted wooden door. Columns were sized according to the distance between the shoulder blades in order

to hold the body when leant against. To Kammeÿer, “Columns are columns and they never become part of the wall,” in this way the columns sit separately from the wall, evidence of a Corbusian way of thinking. Not only do the columns support the drum but the architects were conscious of the fact that the building is not just ‘held up’ but that the columns become an experience. The structure is experiential and has a heaviness, which makes reference to older cathedrals. Each element is treated independently: the walls, beams and balustrades add to one another without merging into combined entities. Glass has a grey tone, and so the mullions of the windows were deliberately painted gray in order to create a plane in the same way that the brickwork is in a plane. In the fellowship building, the handrail, which sits on the inside of the glass, is painted green for safety reasons and in order to communicate the curve. The conception of shear planes of brickwork, without any articulation, shows the influence of Aalto’s design. The architects deliberately did not want to use shadow lines, the only differentiation was provided by the horizontal, concrete beams. For the specific strength of the bricks used, a beam was necessary every 7 metres in order to support the 18 metre height, from the floor to the top of the drum. The white, curvilinear walls create an intimate geometry which is in contrast to the emptiness above. They slope at 5 degrees into the cylinder in order to reflect the voice down into the congregation. The architects were advised against using a drum form as it was said that it would be impossible to make it work acoustically. In fact, the acoustic reverberation time is absolutely ideal for the Anglican service, which is predominantly a sung one. One of the members of the choir commented to the architects, “For the first time we sound like the Kings College Choir.”

The experience The circular form of the main body of the church makes use of pure form to represent a symbolic ideal, while the curving walls that surround, relate back to the pedestrian and to the city; formally this becomes a wrapping of walls ascending to meet the volume. The raised brick, screen wall meanders outwards towards the cityscape and suggests the space beyond, demarcating relation to a greater context. In this way, the edges of the Cathedral are softened but there is also the theme of juxtaposition, of hard edges that protrude. This duality is reiterated in the use of materials, the warm, pink Pietermaritzburg brick sits in contrast to the beton-brut and the sometimes angular nature of its treatment. The curving of the edges and the use of the round external stairs, result in a bold combination of forms which interact and respond to one another in both the vertical and horizontal planes. The fellowship building faces onto the yellowwood grove, the aging of the concrete creates a starkness of edge, which translates the experience of the garden into architectural space. It

The appropriation of the building: Kammeÿer speaks of the fact that the column was not originally green, “ I appreciate that the congregation made it their building.” This is what the Smithsons would describe as the ‘signs of occupancy.’ The Cross of Nails: When Coventry Cathedral was bombed and as a result burned down, the nails from the trusses were made into crosses and sent to Cathedrals all over the world for the collection of money to rebuild.

Left: The image shows the coming together of the drum, the cross and the square. The square was deliberately moved down from the roof itself in order to let in clerestory light. The geometry of the box was dictated by the organ: each reads as a separate element.

is this combination of atmospheres that creates the fullness of the experience, a sense of peace, which is tinged with an underlying feeling of nostalgia. The use of materials picks up on the strains of the existing, and while there is a process of harmonization, there is also a tension, which results. The Cathedral, with its fellowship building, settles into the city context, precisely because there is a meeting of elements, of those that jar and those that blend. A pattern of interdependent themes is gradually woven into the drama of experience. A centre is created for the convergence of a diversity of values and influence. A filtering occurs which is reiterated by the movement of the form towards the pure geometry of the centre. The ambulatory spaces of the traditional church plan are replaced by curving walls of half height, which separate them from the central circle. In fact, the side chapel is upstairs and set apart from the main body of the church. These lower walls allow for glimpses of the central roof, and there is a ‘peek’ point at the top of the stairs above the altar from which an observer could view the whole service (this was intended primarily for the filming of televised services). As a built structure, it seems to suggest climbing, a ladder for the mind in which tucked away and hidden spaces are revealed through exploration. There is a sense of this while seated in the service – of ‘spaces behind’. This theme is picked up in the roofscapes, some of which are accessible and some not, hinting at the possibility of transcendence, but also speaking of physical impossibility, of human capability which is humbled in the face of the unseen. The structure itself does not have this limitation: walls appear to lift over one another and there is a sense of lightness, and of ascension, which is created by the structural framing. The reference to the beyond, as seen in the interior, is echoed externally by the views which are provided through the structure, revealing the garden and the sky as an extension of the architecture. The entrance into the cathedral is marked by a tiled labyrinth at the main door; the labyrinth is a reminder of the importance of choice and, in mythic tales presents a spiritual dilemma. In the same way, the arrangement of the architectural elements on the site creates an experience which is not fully comprehensible. At one level there is the logic of the central geometry, and the mediation of this towards the pedestrian, at another level there is the juxtaposition of overhead elements and the presence of an ‘intruding’ geometry which creates complexity, a confusion which is a fact of life arising out of the urban condition. The medium of architecture communicates this by making certain aspects clear but veiling a total understanding; this secrecy is described, by Heinrich, as the building revealing itself in little bits, “Familiarity comes over time”. There is a simplification as one nears the centre, leaving behind the bustling city and the meandering, spontaneous walls, toward a unity of structure reflecting a complete and cogent spiritual experience.

Both Rozendal and Kammeÿer were intrigued by the study of Archaeology. Subliminally, this influenced the layering of the walls, which allowed for an inclusivity of space: walls are ‘picked up’ and are constantly penetrable and the relationship of forms to one another is contoured. This, in combination with the horizontal emphasis on texture, speaks of earthiness and grounding and is heightened by the weathering of the concrete, which attributes to it an age. There is in the relationship of form and material, a reference to geological time, the earth’s time. The human mind gives time to the timeless, the seven days of creation, and yet the spiritual is viewed through our own architecture; the experience of the sacred is of our own design. The challenge in the design of this Cathedral, was the formation of a space that would be both powerful and intimate, inspiring the community and celebrating the worship of a higher power in a place of dignity and ritual.

Above: The meandering, screen wall brings you into the church: the shadow pattern cast was intended to emphasize the route of entry. The route is not prescribed but is rather suggested. While in many of the other competition entries, the dark brick of the OK Bazaars wall was viewed in a negative light and was screened oﬀ, Kammeÿer and Rozendal aimed to endow the wall with richness with the addition of the Pietermaritzburg pink as a band across it.

Left: The wall over the sidewalk, with its cross in negative, became a billboard. “You were always conscious of the Cathedral but never overawed by it.” – Heinrich Kammeÿer

All photographs taken by Patricia Theron and Heinrich Kammeÿer

Meeting of the two churches, New and Old

LANGUAGE AND OTHER CONSTRUCTIONS

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Architectural colloquialisms by Arthur Barker

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Avoiding clichés If you didn’t know by now there is a ‘language’ of architecture. Well, in my opinion, four languages really. The ‘act of architecture’ is communicated through verbal argument, writing, drawing and, eventually, through building. In Boukunde, a number of colloquialisms have crept into these ‘languages’. This dumbs down academic and architectural validity and a true understanding of intended meaning. Terms and forms become overused and, more often than not, abused. In my final year at UCT, I expressed to my year supervisor, John Moyle, that “I like the idea of a big roof ” to which he replied “Well, Arthur. Do you like the idea of a big roof or a big roof?”. The fact that I remember this critique 33 years later, means it must have had some, positive, impact. Probably, choose your words carefully! And so it should be with all of the languages of architecture. Through our education (and eventually through practice) we seem to become less critical by blindingly accepting architectural terms, approaches and forms without understanding their implicit meaning. While doing my school talk on NY and LA in Boukunde a few months ago, Nico Botes protested my intended use of the word ‘like’. That reminded me of the other terms that first-years abuse when they first enter the hallowed halls of Boukunde - “well, basically, sort-of, you know, MY building”. Nico ‘beats’ that out of them very quickly but, rather sooner than later, a Boukunde language fills the gap! A new way of communicating arises, that Gus Gerneke would probably call pretentious! To deal with these issues, I ban overused terminology and approaches and abused architectural forms in my MProf architecture studio. Pedantic as it may be, I do this so that a critical understanding of their use is encouraged to prevent a slippery slope into stylistics and biased argument. I provide some examples to explain my logic.

terms Although many high school colloquialisms have been successfully culled by Nico Botes in the first year, the MProf architecture students arrive in my studio with new and more ‘sophisticated’ architectural clichés that have been absorbed into their vocabulary. These expressions are most often used in verbal presentations and although they represent an understanding of architectural theory, and an engagement with the discipline, they often sit at the poles of architectural thought. Stereotomic and tectonic have become the flavour of the day to describe structural or technological concepts. Although Kenneth Frampton may have adequately explained their classical derivation, and meaning, I don’t think that he ever intended them to be the only ways of giving material Left: Mecanoo Architecten’s Kaap Skil Maritime and Beachcombers Museum in Oudeschild, on the island of Texel in the Netherlands 2007-2009 (http://www.dezeen.com/2013/09/18/ kaap-skil-maritime-and-beachcombers-museum-by-mecanoo/ [accessed 1 April 2015]). Bottom: Patkau’s Seabird Island School, Agassiz, British Columbia, 1988-1991 (http:// www.patkau.ca/ [accessed 1 April 2015])

expression to architecture. Buildings are inevitably constructed using both methodologies so why don’t we just explain the compressive and the framed elements and, more importantly, how these are combined? Thank heavens the philosophy (and it is just that really as no-one has successfully made it architectural) of phenomenology has taken a back seat but it seems to have been replaced by the word sustainable, lately to be rehashed as regenerative or resilient. Although we need to understand the value of these terms for architecture and where these approaches are headed they are really just common sense approaches for making architecture. Allied to this is the trend of productive landscapes, often associated with urban agriculture. This may have started before my time at Boukunde but was blatantly present in 2010 with Calayde Davey’s dissertation at the Pretoria West Power Station. A powerful scheme in terms of adaptive reuse and climate change but architecturally rather limited. Can space for plants really provide much room for architectural and spatial exploration? Then there is the intervention! An anonymous entity that camouflages itself in its context, sans program or even form! Just call a spade a spade. Have we become afraid of program as a valid way of describing a building? But please don’t do buildings - it’s very uncomfortable! We design buildings that house programs and that are built in particular contexts.

Forms

‘This is where serious innoThese are the result of our approaches to vation is required oftspatial en making architecture. They create abut visual and language. It is the core of our discipline and sets us we from lapse into stylistic ‘flaapart any other builtthe environment professionals. This is where serious innovation is required but often vours’ we lapse intoof the the stylisticmoment. ‘flavours’ of the’ moment.

Most evident in the MProf architecture course is what has lately been referred to as the Boukunde section partly inspired, I think, by many of the roofs of the practice, previously known as, Noero Wolff. This flattened variation of the mono-pitch roof works well to allow stack ventilation but cannot solve all aspects of making the overhead plane. What’s wrong with a double pitch roof? Meccano created a wonderfully articulated interpretation in their 2011 Kaap Skil Maritime and Beachcombers Museum in the Netherlands while the Canadian architects, Patkau, and even Gawie Fagan are masters at manipulating this type of roof. At the other end of the scale is the flat roof, most often used to solve complex plans! If it accessible, articulated and well insulated it may work. But the worst, and highly abused, roof form is the Pretoria mono-pitch rising uncontrollably to the north with awkward window junctions and an unarticulated ceiling plane. And who said buildings should only face north?

Extended monopitch shading a wall! I am convinced that students can’t design elevations anymore. The screen has become the go-to solution and even though I rave about the sexy form of Thom Mayne’s 41 Cooper Square, it is just a rectangular form wrapped in steel ‘cloth’. This brings up another point. Peter Eisenmann critiqued cartesian rationality (sorry, I should say the use of the right angle) so why do we still resort to the rectangular box as a first formal response. I am not suggesting slanted walls in section as a solution but they can be angled or curved in plan as Hans Scharoun, at the height of the orthodoxy of the Modern Movement, so successfully demonstrated in his 1935 House Baensch in Berlin. Here the right angle made way for organic space organised by function and view.

So what now?

I must, of course, be careful of being referred to as ‘the pot that called the kettle black’. Most of the terms, approaches and forms have occurred under my watch, but fortunately I have taken note and banned their direct use. It is so easy to use the architectural colloquialisms and clichés I have noted. Being critical takes energy. It also requires effort to understand where the approaches I have listed are valid. So, continue questioning. Push the boundaries of architectural convention. Avoid using architectural slang and create your own, intelligible, architectural languages!

at 50 15th Street, Menlo Park by Sonja Neitz Architects. Extended monopitch shading a wall!

x x peace is white text on a full image

Top: Calayde Davey’s greenhouse at the Pretoria West Power Station © Barker, 2010 Middle: Heidi van Eeden’s Corobrik winning scheme of 2013 © Barker, 2010 Bottom: Eulinid Farmer MProf(Arch) student of

2014 - perspective section of the ubiquitous monopitch © Barker, 2014. Bootm Right: Justine Pieterse MProf (Arch) student technology concept

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Top: Hans Scharoun’s development of the plan of House Baensch in Berlin, 1935 © Barker, 2006, Unpublished Theory of Design Course notes, CPUT.

Neologism : A nex lexicon that assists in decoding the bedlam of the urban context.

Inner city sanctum: A language understanding centre By Mark de Verdicisis

In the CBD of Tshwane, a cross societal and cultural architecture, that is of and from place, is used to create an inner-city sanctum of a lingual repository that connects all walks of life in a societal apotheosis. Within a worldly context, language barriers are the only thing separating humanity from open communication. A lingual repository will serve people on both the hyper global and hyper local levels, universally connecting humans by celebrating their diversity and uniqueness. In a facility that openly facilitates human communication in an architectural translation, translation of the built context and a programme of translation contained within.

Architectural Beginnings A neologism or newly created language will be used to openly differentiate the proposed intervention to the built connect. These are the pathways. The building’s form would “melt” and deform into the pathways that connect them. This morphing will become a volumetric manner of justification mimesis by homogenising all the existant architectural forms into a conglomerated mass with an openly understandable agglomeration of forms that have a dialogue between each other and the pathways that connect them.

Above : Final development of the Parti diagram by the author Opposite top: Pixelation of structure deriving from torsion and distorition Opposite middle: Axometric site and program diagram by author Opposite Bottom: Series of photgraphs of model development by the author

The Urban Issue The site under investigation is seen as a politically and economically charged precinct within the CBD of Pretoria. The intention of the surrounding buildings is clear but their forms have no apparent discourse between each other and they only speak an internalised conversation of self-referential importance instead of stylistic and formal lucidity or a sense of contextual reference that would assist in the understanding of the space and times- the zeitgeist - that the architecture was conceived in. What is necessary is an iconoclastic architecture that openly elucidates the programmatic intention as a lingual repository, but at the same time must also encourage the union with regards to its immediate context albeit a scene a very juxtaposed conflicting histories each requiring a justified memorialisation. A heavily insensitive approach to adaptive reuse architecture will be employed by means of subtracting material and form from adjacent buildings to use the very materials themselves as a means of morphing the original shape into a homogenous puddle punctuated and parenthesised by the functionally bridging pathways. Identified languages of architecture on site are warped and deformed into an amorphous mass. By subtractively deforming the built context, material will be gained to deform the built environment still in keeping with their inherent structural tenets or building styles, but be coalesced in a volumetric expression of the confusion of formal languages and allow their programs to emanate into each other. The methodology of morphing the exiting context is one of a

contextually derived, material system based on forms found in architectures of the area. These material systems are identified, repeated, distorted and dissolved into the urban landscape. This will be used as an unanimous translator of architectural built form and a programme of translation. The architecture is from and out of place and will be used to achieve a sense of societal apotheosis. The program has a public interface on street level and of publishing and exhibition, retail and semi private repose spaces.

Programmatically Speaking Programmatically it will be a place where information is forced on the observer. The confrontation with information, both vocal and visual, will make the transient flaneur and user become part of the building in an interactive manner This would take the form of a street interface where information or colloquialisms could be recorded and replayed back to the viewer/listener. A vocal bombardment platform of an installation type nature will be used to entice transient visitors and daily users of the site into the building and install a sense of seduction into the building. The building is also used as a platform to become more cognisant of one’s surrounding context. This cacophony of sights and sounds make for slowing down of the transient flaneur’s mere traversal across the site and force them to interact with their surroundings in a way that they are enriched whether they like it or not, by the time they egress the facility.

PEOPLE MADE PLACES

Montju誰c Communications Tower, Santiago Calatrava: 1992

Barcelona Trip 2015

Toward the end of April 2015 a handful of Boukunde students took to the streets of Barcelona for some collateral learning. 4.

11.

10.

Clockwise Top to Bottom: 1- Flight wing 2- Posing at the Pavilion 3- Casa Batlló, Antoni Gaudí : 1906 4- Biomedical Research Park, Manel Brullet + Albert de Pineda: 2006 5- Barcelona Pavilion, Mies v.d. Rohe: 1929 6- Gas Natural, EMBT: 2008 7- Mercat Encants, b720 Fermín Vázquez Arquitectos: 2013 8- “Did you order a Bikini and were you then disappointed to receive a sandwich?” 9-Las Arenas, Richard Rogers + Alonso y Balaguer: 2011 10- “Don’t tell me tapas things.” 11-“The Spaniards know how to waste bricks” Photo Credits: Lesego Bantsheng Hayley Dickens Nadia Ghillino Yan Gong Kim Guan Calvin Janse van Vuuren Jan Hendrik Jooste Alexia Kolatsis Arthur Lehloenya Lebo Mokolane Miliswa Ndziba Stephen Steyn

Reflections: Coromandel, a manor in the landscape Contibutions from Edna Peres, Heinrich Kammeÿer

The Coromandel Estate Manor House (1975) lies camouflaged within the grasslands of Mpumalanga. This mysterious building has captivated many South African architects who have heard its story or explored its cavernous spaces, and its vague history defies obscurity by repeatedly re-emerging into popular culture and thereby aﬃrming its importance within South Africa. Part building, part landscape, part historical tragedy, today its attraction lies in its embodiment of a ‘ruin’ that has seamlessly adapted and fused with its natural habitat. – Edna Peres for Architecture SA, 2013: Coromandel, a ‘ruin’ of the landscape.

Above: Illustration by Arthur Lehloenya of the Coromandel Butress. Middle : Fernand Léger, Paysage à l’oiseau (Bird in Landscape). Oil on canvas, 25 3/4 x 36 1/4 inches. Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Below : Photographs by Arthur Lehloenya of the water feature, interior and northern facade.

Impressions – by Heinrich Kammeÿer The first impression was of Leger and his drawings of nature re-aﬃrming itself. In this case however, not as a take-over but a layer of time, a patina of life. The architectural severity of the first images in Myra FasslerKamstra’s photo’s was enfolded by a soft-architectural cloak, mature trees, ferns, their diaspora found footholds within crevices in the stone walls, wild figs sent out strands of roots, within the nature of nature, the realm of the imponderable. But the beauty of interaction between this cover and the home, reinforce a deeper meaning, not of dominance but of cohesion. Occasional sun rays shafting through a predominance of clouds, mist and rain, at the time of our visit, lit up soft intense green lanterns of ferns elevated up against the high dark grey stone walls. Again, grown trees now bring shade into the spaces created between the walls, with their transparent crowns creating cool interiors within the in-between; ceilings to the exteriors. On the pebbled floor, Clivias add bright red tussles above the coherent dark green base of these lilies. Views out, as well as into, the alternating tentacles of enclosed living space and delineated open space, bring a variety of emotive places into the play. Sparingly detailed openings, in the hard stone walls, reveal to both inside and outside, glimpses of action or tranquility. Views from the front terrace across the dam, valley and sky, with its drifting, changing clouds and their own secret destinations, remind us of our own short interactions. A luxurious interior and exterior turned this house into home-as-artefact, to be enjoyed, lived and experienced, from day to night throughout the changes of seasons, as was intended by clients and makers. This was my experience of being from the landed gentry, place has an essential emotive content beyond mere function. Habitation from edge to horizon.

THEORY THEORY

The Primitive Hut by Laugier A detail

Overview of Honours Theory This is a selection of the Honours theory work, as extracts from the original essays they are not meant to be read as comprehensive overviews but rather as fragments covering a variety of perspectives: digital frameworks, object-oriented ontology, space theory and phenomenology.

How to feel image: Navigating the reality of digital image as place Written by Ilze Mari Wessels

What does the image feel like?

The self in the screen

The image in its essence is an object of representation. [Bachelard and Jolas, 1994:10] The image painted at the Lascaux caves in France did not feel anything like a cow, a hunter or even taste and smell like the blood shed from that hunt. It felt like stone; hard, cool and rough, dry and maybe even moist. The image was sculptural. The same is true of hieroglyphs, the flood tablet with the epic of Gilgamesh and other ancient carvings of narratives onto objects, the image itself became the image of place [Certeau 1984: 79] and the image itself is more than just an image, it too is a surface which allows for the existence of image.

The cellphone screen becomes more integrated with our bodies border lining ambient technology {Lister 2013: 87], and with this merger of the body and technology, so the body and image of body become one experience. The Oculus rift, 4d scanners like those used by the ScanLab projects [Figure 4} are images of place which can now become fully experienced as a real place.

How then do we feel the image and its realness? This paper intends to explore the variety of meaning of places related to the digital image in order to understand the new terroties of the online world and its effects on image culture. The image below has meaning to everyone, because we will always try and associate what we see with ourselves. However the image above is an image of extreme personal value to the author. It is an image of the house where the author grew up in. The place of memory overrides the place of the image and that place of memory is yet to be understood in image, because in response to Beckmann, it is all that makes reality stable.

We experience the screen on a personal and intimate level, so much so that it often even acts like a mirror without having to even take a selfie. The black screen of the cellphone mimics the Claude glass, a tool used by artists during the 17th century as a filter through which to see reality. Essentially the same is true of the camera, the small palm-sized apparatus is used as the filter through we are constantly seeing our reality and thus creating what is known as the augmented vision. Essentially we begin to dwell in two different places, however we exist in one body.

Screened places {the photograph] ...a complex transcription of a three-dimensional world onto a small flat surface {Pellezarri 2011:107] This layer of memory translates into the figurative nature of image as the third dimension of matter. Social documentary photographs which include street

photography, are photographs with an augmented layer of the question as discussed under the heading, Collective screens.’ In Nadav Kanders’ photo above, despite the image being a beautiful arrangement of colours compositionally well situated, there exists a question. Why is there a family dining underneath a bridge beside a dirty river?

The memory-less image Can image be understood without memory? The image has a relationship with its author, who too has an image about them that has been shaped by place and is defined continuously through memories and memory making.

Opposite : Screenshot of Google Streetview Above: Nadav Kander, Dining. Photograph, Barbican Art Gallery 2014

Above : Images from the Google Nine Project by Jon Rafman http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/picture-galleries/9096610/The-Nine-Eyes-of-Google-Street-View-a-photoproject-by-Jon-Rafman.html

A spatial organisation has been produced – because memory has intervened at a particular time – because of a paradigmatic sequence that has come about from a diﬀerence in time and space [Carteau 1984: 84]

produces images such as figure 10, that could easily be mistaken for a professional street photograph. These images exist without memory of place and time related to that particular image. The question the photograph elicits is the same why the social documentary photography elicits, however it can never be answered or even attempted to be understood in any real sense because the driver of the car was driving and not photographing. Technology merely remember our augmentation from reality and thus distorts our reality even more than we do.

The technological memory is larger and longer lasting than that of human. Technology is also getting better at remembering images, thereby remembering our memories for us. Facial recognition informs technology who we are taking pictures of and who is taking pictures of us and the advanced inventions of 3d scanners has technology successfully capturing and literally consuming all place and people to form its own memory of humanity. However in the figure, the image has been taken by the google street view car, a concise database of modern day street photography which sometimes

What I’m doing is writing my realism, my real world. If an unpredictable thing happens, it proves that you are doing something good, something true. So if the Sheep Man comes up, he’s real to me, you know. No symbol. No metaphor. Just he and I.” - Hauruki Murukami

Beyond modernism: A new perspective on design Written by Gillian van der Klashorst “Which creature in the morning goes on four legs, at midday on two, and in the evening upon three, and the more legs it has, the weaker it be? Well, the Moderns of course, now knowing full well that they are blind and fumbling in the dark and that they need a white cane to slowly and cautiously feel the obstacles that lie ahead!” (Latour, 2010). In the strive toward the purification of nature, modernity has neglected the value and impermanence of our resources and has left us with the current ecological crisis. The word ‘modern’ refers to an acceleration, a break from the past, a revolution. Modernity created two separate ontological notions; nature (nonhumans) and culture (humans) . Rendering nature as a stable entity that have always been there,(and will always be) and society with predictable interests in nature.

Modernism tries to clarify or purify objects into, a for example, theory of nature. The way to find the universal truth is to investigate the theory of nature or cultural convention. Modern thinkers continually jumped between the two fields and claimed that a phenomena can either be produced through a natural or social truth. It is this divide between nature and culture that make the modems seem ’invincible’. One will argue that humans have free will and can control their destiny, another will argue to listen to the Laws of Nature. Instead Latour suggest that everything occurs in the mid realm; “everything happens by way of mediation, translation and networks, but this space does not exits (for the moderns), it has no place” (Harman, 2010).

Latour proposed, as a way of looking beyond the opposing entities of subject and object, the notion of hybrid networks: Looking at the world symmetrically with the network theory as a series of relations between human and non-human objects. Thus as we look at the above image, we stop being modern, and at the same time, stop having been modern, thus we were never modern (Latour, 1993). The modern can be summarised in three categories: Critique, Nature, Progress. critique: Critique is dependent on the certainty of the world beyond this world, on the knowing of an absolute truth on witch its argument is based. Compositionisms believes there is no certainty beyond thus finds no use in ‘poking (a) hole’ if there’s nothing to find (Latour, 2010). nature: This leads us to question the absoluteness of nature that critique has been based on. Nature as a static thing is invalid, thus the term ecology means the end of nature. Ecology being the notion concerned with the relations of organism as well as to humans with the goal of protecting the environment. ”once out of nature” according to Sloterdijk art and nature can merge. If we want to compose a common world, since we cannot rely on an already assembled nature,’ we must look into the mundane, immanent, realistic, and embodied definition of the material world (Latour, 2010). Progress: Modernism as a reaction to the past and a focus on progress refrained to look into the future. And the future caught up with us in the form of the ecological crisis that has forced us to approach architecture and making of buildings differently (Latour, 2010).

To further explain Latours theory of networks it is important to describe the term ‘actor’, as something between and object and subject, instead the combination of them. Latour describe actors as being precarious likened to the notion of “quasi-objects”; on the one side agents interact and responds to the objects in its direct surroundings, and on the other hand, they are never fully quantifiable in the relations to other objects1. Thus one cannot have the full knowledge of a specific object. Relations to other objects also have an influence on the behaviour of the specific object. For example, an Iceberg is natural, but not fully, because it is transformed and influenced by networks it interacts with, such as tourism, Natural Geographic, and global warming. The very reality of this Iceberg is changed: Acid rain and warmer temperatures melt and destroy it. In terms of created objects, once created, it simply exists, like a flowerbed, but still retain the ‘quasi-ness’ in its relations and potential to be transformed (Harman, 2010).

Above: Image of 25th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall Opposite: Diagram by author of Modernism vs Networks

Latour emphasizes the importance of the term design in the following points: Design, unlike ‘construction’ or ‘building’ implies humility and care. The term design skill is closely associated with design; the attention to detail in craftsmanship and cautious, careful design. Designing an artefact gives it meaning. This notion boosts the turning of things from matter of fact to matter of concern, thus the de-modernization.

The 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, the end of the Cold War, was celebrated last year. This moment in history can be outlined as the “death of the great ideologies, the collapse of a dual superpower conflict into regional vendettas, and the undeniable re- emergence of objective physical reality in the environmental ruins of Eastern Europe”. (Harman, 2010) The year of 1989 is also marked the time in which the notion of hybrid networks became more prominent in philosophy and when Bruno Latour looked at alternatives to modernism (Harman, 2010).

“Designing is the antidote to founding, colonizing, establishing, or breaking with the past. It is antidote to hubris and to the search for absolute certainty, absolute beginnings and radical departures”.

Nothing in design is new, everything is redesigned. Then design becomes a replacement for revolution and modernization. Latour further argues: Design always includes an ethical character in terms of good or bad design. Design thus carries with it not only meaning and ‘hermeneutics’ but also ethics. With the end of modernism, no designer can hide behind facts or absolute truth, but ends up dealing with ethics (Latour, 2008).

Space of Culture_Culture of Space Architecture as a Cultural Work Written by Chrisna Viljoen “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present- day polemics oppose the pious descendants of time and the determined inhabitants of space.” - Michael Foucault “It is necessary to make images that are themselves capable of self-movement.” - Gilles Deleuze The interaction between space and human action is what constitutes social and cultural life. Space is not a ‘thing’ that can be made or enforced, but rather a continuous event that happens regardless. Space is not a construct removed from the body, the body is not placed ‘in’ space but both form part of a world that gets articulated by the body through lived-space. Like space, the act of architecture is not separated from this construct. Like space, architecture is a continuous event capable of layering and tracing our marks in the world. It is able to contribute to our collective memory, our identity. Like everyday life architecture is a cultural event. Architecture as a cultural work renders the architect as taking part in a cultural event and not as a technician. The act of using and dwelling, the housing of the everyday is what forms the architecture. The physical building, the end product the object, is not architecture. The primitive hut [ see image on right] as the primordial shelter perhaps for the first time transcended its structuralism to a spatial matrix in The Essence of Architectural Creation written by August Schmarsow in 1894 (Schmarsow. 1894). With the hut now applied with the role as the creatress of space, Schmarsow came to see the evolution of architecture as the progressive unfolding of man’s feeling for space (Frampton. 1996:1). For Frampton, in his book, Studies in Tectonic Culture, the unavoidable earthbound nature of a building is as tectonic and tactile in character as it is scenographic and visual, without one of these attributes deny its spatiality (Frampton.1996:2). For him a building cannot be figurative or abstract even though it is part of the arts, he asserts that the building is first a construction and only later a abstract discourse. In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger uses the example of a Greek temple to explain how

the work of art becomes a pathway to something ells. He points out that he makes use of a building because it cannot be ‘ranked as a representational art.’ The building, the temple portrays nothing, but it encloses the figure of the god extending the building as a holy precinct, yet without diluting the building into the indefinite. Around, within and part of the structures, a meaning giving relationship is formed. A particular kind of being human is manifested in the creation of the temple (Heidegger, 2002: 167). “ The temple-work, standing there, opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back again on earth, which itself only thus emerges as a native ground” (Heidegger, 2002: 168). Thus the temple is not placed within a context, defining the context but rather “added to what is already there.” “the temple, first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves.” He argues that this is possible only if the “work is a work”, only if the meaning giving relationships is intact. By erecting a building, by “setting up” a work, it cannot be viewed as mere placement. “To dedicate means to consecrate, in the sense that in setting up the work the holy is opened up as holy and the god is invoked into the openness of his presence. Praise belongs to dedication as doing honour to the dignity and splendour of the god. Dignity and splendour are not properties beside and behind which the god, too, stands as something distinct, but it is rather in the dignity, in the splendour that the god comes to presence” (Heidegger, 2002: 169). If this is related to culture one can argue that culture is not the aesthetics or ornaments entitled to a specific ethnic group. A cultural experience cannot be viewed, but as the god, it is rather in the dignity and splendour, in that of the everyday life that culture comes to presence. “In the reflected glory of this splendour there glows, i.e., there clarifies, what we called the world. To e-rect means: to open the right in the sense of a guiding measure, a form in which what is essential gives guidance” (Heidegger, 2002: 169). According to Heidegger this is possible because the work in itself is something that sets up. With its own existence, within itself the work opens up a world thus “To be work, means to set up a world.” Experience cannot be reduced to a matter of the visual registration of coded messages. Creating architecture for the sake of creating an image has diluted the dwelling experience and as a result lived culture. The body has been reduced to needs and constraints linking design to list of requirements. Thus linking architecture back to the structuralism of the

primitive hut. Forgetting, as Schmarsow puts it, that our concept of space is determined by the frontalized progression of the body through space in depth (Frampton. 1996). The notion that the dweller realises itself through lived-in space is supported by Tadao Ando’s characterization of the Shintai. He argues that man articulates the world through his body. The body is placed in the “here and now” and subsequently a “there” appears. Through this perception an awareness off surrounding space manifests. “The world that appears to man’s senses and the state of man’s body become in this way interdependent. The world articulated by the body becomes a vivid lived in space” (Frampton. 1996:11). “ The body articulates the world, at the same time the body is articulated by the world.” Thus though our interaction and defining an object we are as living beings defining ourselves. Tadao uses the example of a “I” that perceives concrete as something that is hard and cold. Through this perception, the “I” recognises the body as something warm and soft. Thus the body is an a dynamic relationship with the world and responds to the world. The impact of the tectonic display within architecture should thus become an extension of this relationship (Frampton. 1996:11).

Above: Image of the Acropolis (sourced from the Architectural Review) Below: Laugier’s Primitive Hut

Dialogue of Thresholds Phenomenology in Architecture Written by Arthur Lehloenya

Scene I: The passerby The music school sits on the left with sunken retreat spaces and glass facades allowing for an experiential connection with the landscape, a poetic link. As the wanderer walks along the way, he reaches a vantage point where the image of the building appears through the trees. The taste of the apple... lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; In a similar way...poetry lies in the meaning of the poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the page of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with the reading. -Jorge Luis Borges- (Holl, Pallasmaa and Pérez Gómez, 2006)

Scene II: The night scene I sat with someone; I could not do it alone. We laid on the ground, watched the sky, we discussed the place. I recently met her, a new found interest I suppose, and under the crescent moon we discussed the night. The sky had few clouds, they were making faces, we observed, we learned from each other, I grew to know her, I grew to know the world through her. Often in this world, we are so concerned with having, acquiring wanting what we cannot have, and for that time in period, we were not guided by society’s fast accelerated life but we stood and dwelled. Pictures came and faded, we were able to smell the grass, it was a moist smell, and intermittently the smell of jacarandas would appear. There was moderate wind, it was a midnight summer’s dream, and an everyday consisting of concrete phenomena; stone, earth, ground, grass, the avenue, the trees. It consisted of the moon, of human, of clouds, and the dynamism of changing environmental conditions. We walked to the side of the temple, where God was housed; there were slits (windows) which shined on the ground outside. The building is separated into three tiers, and the ground level has been emulated to seem like the basement, and thus aroused feelings of urges and sexual yearning, especially noticing open books laid on the table, increasing temptations of historical knowledge. This feeling of urges is guided by the heavy stereotomic masses of the material’s substance, the references to Egyptian architecture of the temples was also noticed, with the base tapering outwards to create a triangular base. The colours of the ground floor level (not to be mistaken with the outside ground floor), are also reminiscent of temples, of an oriental origin.

Above: Sketch depicting the many layers put forth before experiencing the form Below: The Basement windows of the Old Merensky Library

Interlude: The sleepwalker When a person sleepwalks, he is able to manoeuvre through spaces, unlock doors, and wake up without prior knowledge or memory of the incident happening. The mind goes into consciousness while the body remains unconscious. This then could possibly signify that our bodies are just encasements of our mind. The material and physical presence of the body is irrelevant, and the mind is consciousness. Anything conceived from the mind is not necessarily right or wrong, or logical for that matter, but denies the vanity of society, and that through control of the mind, one can achieve a state of consciousness in which all things before him are experienced as they should be in everyday life.

Scene III: Engagement

Sketch showing the patterns

The patterns on the faรงade of the building are reminiscent or appear to be of African influence, more specifically of Egyptian architecture, through use of textural facades, enriching a gaze and haptic senses, as though there has been a gathering, where the dome above the structure connects the heavens with the earth, and the trees ensure a grounding for the building, and the trees themselves stick out into the landscapes as though they are extension and mediators of sky and the ground.

Scene IV: Setting The avenue itself presents many facets of life, one that resonated ideas of momentary pause and selfabsorption. There almost exists an invisible gateway and through the frames created by the trees, there is a dialogue in thresholds, spaces are not single entities, spaces are not identities, but are identifications, binding themselves to some context, to some nearby building or some trees. In the middle of the Musaion exists a sunken staircase, that ages and is neglected. Within the same space at the centre is a sculptural water feature with a bowl at the top with water spouting.

Sketch of the water feature and Musaion in the background

The most extraordinary thing about this man made structure, consciously or unconsciously designed, invites birds, it does not place spikes to keep them away, it becomes an architectural piece, creating a serene place. This proves that art is a remarkable tool; it allows for relationships to occur, for self-reflection, for the diminishing of the object itself but more of what it does for the landscape. But where is everyone? People are too fast moving within thresholds, and these boundaries are becoming thinner and less dense and becoming too near to one another; not physically of course but metaphorically speaking.

Sketch by the park benches

Birds at the Musaion cleansing and rejuvenating

Bird in landing, Musaion

Bird in flight, Musaion

Critical Regionalism by Loic Barrier

Tout l’univers visible n’est qu’un magasin d’images et de signes auxquels l’imagination donnera une place et une valeur relative; c’est une espèce de pâture que l’imagination doit digérer et transformer. Toutes les facultés de l’âme humaine doivent être subordonnées à l’imagination, qui les met en réquisition toutes a la fois. Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1859 (Kopp, 2004, pg 109) When we consider definition of critical regionalism as a “fundamental strategy […] to mediate the impact of universal civilisations with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place”(Frampton, 1983, pg 21), in conjunction with Lyotard’s (1979) perception of the shift from meta- to micro-narratives, there is a perceivable link. The idea being of a shift from a totalitarian and universal absolute that was present in modernism, through to an approach of postmodernism that attempts to expose the concept of the ‘different’ (Raynova, 1996, pg 9). This pursuit has been the source of stylistic variations and theoretical discourse over the past few decades, as there is growing desire to define a paradigm within which essentially all social, intellectual and creative forms would now evolve. Inside of the paradigm of ‘difference’, the desire leans towards ideas of inclusiveness, a deep understanding of the variations that exist not only globally, but more pertinently individually. This means that the growing universal trend is of attention being brought closer to the individual, and is readily visible in the explosion of social medias and platforms upon which the unit can voice their thoughts and opinion to the entirety. The influx of accessible information is strife with auteurship and hypertexting, whilst suggestive of Habermas (1997) thoughts of unanimity of discourse, Lyotard referred to Kant in breaking that concept apart by questioning the subjective perception (Raynova, 1996, pg 8). Through personal introspection of each day there is a defined blur that exists, between the heritage of the enlightenment as rational thought embedded in scientific discourse, and the exponential growth of user centric approach through, at times excessive, elegy of the ‘different’ of individuality. When considering specifically the variety of attitudes present in design within the local sphere of Pretoria, a plethora of approaches attempt to transcend these ideals into materiality. It suggests Jameson’s (1991) thoughts that the evolution of the built environment has not been followed, let alone kept up by the social evolution of humanity. Looking at the M&T Commercial Head Oﬃce in Centurion by Paragon Architects (Mathews, P. J. 2011, pg 168), along with the CSIR DST (Department of Science & Technology) Head Oﬃce in Pretoria by Bild Architects & Ether Architects (Mathews, P. J. 2011, pg 58), to what extent do these structures converse with their users, display their identity or accommodate the general populace? With the exponential growth of technology in materials, production methods and in design tools, parametricism has emerged to the foreground of most spheres of life, and as such has allowed for a new approach in architectural design, a Pandora’s box of intricacy.

House Mooikloof in Pretoria by ’Ora Joubert Architects

Modernism[…]consciously allied themselves with what they perceived to be the basic trends and promises of contemporary life. […] Modernists embraced the swift pace of the present and attempted to make art that responded to it and enlarged its implications. […] The tempo of change continued its acceleration to a point where audiences had diﬃculty keeping pace with artists and scientists. (Flemmings, Marien, 2005, pg 549-550)

The ‘Post’ of Modernism The presence of Modernism in South Africa was logical, as it allowed what Best and Kellner (1997) suggest as a hegemony of the governing powers, although certain consumerists aspects of the Capitalist undertone were resisted. However, this desire was met with great resistance, socially and environmentally. In Pretoria the move towards critical regionalism happened through necessity, as the climatic and site conditions varied considerably from those where the International Style was born. The few examples that were built ended up with generic modifications to fit the demands of their surroundings. The historical context of South Africa also shifted greatly as the end of the Apartheid was signed and a new inclusive democracy installed, along with great attention and pride put into the creation of a multicultural, multilingual ‘Rainbow Nation’. This inherent meta-narrative meant that, in terms of embracing the ‘different’ postmodernism naturally fell into place, and was welcomed in the field of architecture. The postmodern architectural spectacle is thus that of a global, postindustrial culture of consumerism, media culture, and the aestheticisation of everyday life. […] architecture thus breaks with the quest for purity and reintroduces symbolism, metaphor, colour and past historical styles. The Postmodern Turn (Best, Keller, 1997, pg 24) These principles can be seen to a large extent when looking at House Mooikloof in Pretoria by ’Ora Joubert Architects (Mathews, P. J. 2011, pg 226). Though colour is not greatly represented, great attention was put on the massing and their texture, as the use of stone cladding emphasized their presence. The intricacy in the design of gumpoles, used for the sun screen systems, in order to resolve the unavoidable western orientation pull away from the minimalism of modernity. And yet it is still described as attempting “a synthesis between Eurocentric theoretical premises and our socio-environmental particularities […] whilst respecting the spatial integrity and abstract formalism of Orthodox Modernism.” (Mathews, P. J. 2011, pg 226) Though as a residential building, it can be understood that the driving force behind the design approach was intrinsically linked to a unit, in this case two artists as client with a very concise desire in creating their vision, their mark of auteurship.

Normative Plurality Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of a plastic modulation and articulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in realizing them (Chtcheglov in Knabb, 1981: 2). The paradigm of ownership has evolved considerably over time, ranging from physical appropriation, through abstract assigning and to expression of opinion to a creation. As there is a move towards the exploration of the ‘different’ exposed by postmodernism, so to there is an equal reaction in attempting to maintain status quo in poor guise. Though not an extreme example, this can be seen in ARQ Head Oﬃce in Lynnwood Manor, Pretoria, by Boogertman + partners Architects (Mathews, P. J. 2011, pg 120),, where International Style ideals such as ‘pilotis’, strip windows, ambulatory paths and use of voids were very simply altered for a new form. The approach of “a strict rigourous and rational ‘engineering’ logic, applied with enthousiasm.” (Mathews, P. J. 2011, pg 120), is then validated through an emblematic approach of technology and construction prowess as guarantor. The design impulse lies within the function, albeit with an inclination towards theoretical user integration. If one considers the ideology of a user centric approach in architecture, along with Lyotard’s (1979) meta-narrative, the ideal to strive for would be a morphing typology that displays an individual subjective absolute to each unit, without impeding on the mores of others. Yet that in itself would mean a break of any symbiosis amongst users and by extension their environment. L’hypothèse de Nietzsche que “peut-être l’acceptation du sujet un n’est pas necessaire; peut-être est-il aussi possible d’admettre une pluralité de sujets […], une sorte d’aristocratie de cellules diﬀérentes deviant la these dominante du postmodernisme qui met l’accent sur l’atomisation du savoir, des structures et des relations sociales” (Jean-Francois Lyotard: L’autre Je(u) Raynova, 1996, pg 3). There is already a global thought away from ‘subject one’ and into a plurality of understanding, as it becomes clearer that all knowledge and technology feeds into each other, whether it be the development of smart technologies in phones, adapted into houses, attire or vehicles, to creation of bionic limb replacements. The tendency is towards constant connectivity and global interaction, yet more and more segregated from physical interaction. Combined with the multitude of over-lapping and conflicting auteured metanarratives, abuse of Voltaire’s ideology of fighting for the right to expression of thoughts even if in disagreement, society impedes itself. The only result is;

“[…] implosive violence no longer resulting from the extension of a system but from its saturation and contraction — as in the physical systems of stars. Violence as a consequence of unlimited increase in social density, resulting from an overregulated system, from overloaded networks (of knowledge Information, power?, and from hypertrophied controls that invade all the interstitial paths of facilitation. This violence is unintelligible to us[…]” The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence (Baudrillard, 1981, pg 9) There is a desperate need globally for a shift in perception, whereby identity and culture stem from a single origin of humanity, and the built environment holds a position in which to create such an opportunity. South Africa, and indeed many other countries, is forming impetus to such a direction, though it is still at a stage of technological and material marvel with too narrow a definition of culture and user centric approach to achieve any true advances.

Pandora’s Frivolity A new emphasis arises on decoration and the scenographic dimensions of architecture as opposed to abstract, compositional concerns, as tactile and surface properties are highlighted over abstract structural relationsThe Postmodern Turn (Best, Keller, 1997, pg 24) There is currently a stagnation that exists within the theoretical and academic world, anchored within archaic methodologies that tend to resist newer thoughts and ventures, in part due to the lack of affirmation of a core ideology, but also due to the heritage of the last two defining paradigms; modernity and postmodernity. Whilst modernity can be related to the discovery of the benefits of industrialization, fabrication and capitalism, postmodernity can be over simplified to the reaction against a narrow minded attempt of a universal norm and semiology, which has to be mentioned, was a patriarchal, selectively westernized and elitist form. The fluctuation remains, in consideration of local architecture, whether the directive is that of an “unrealized potential of the incomplete Modern project, as Habermas would have it, or the relativity of inverse narratives relating to the Postmodern condition.” (Environmental Studies 310, 2015, pg 8). Patrik Schumacher(2012) theorises an alternative, or rather the natural progression to stem from these arguments, in the exponential growth of computer aided design and parametricism. If modernism was the exploration of material progress and postmodernism is seen as variations in order to perforate the monotony of form, parametricism can be seen as the evolution thereof, pushing the boundaries of creation through technology. Through this, it allows a certain osmosis between Frampton’s (1983) cultural regionalism and Lyotard’s (1979) meta-narratives, whilst pushing forth Habermas’ (1997) core impulse of modernism. Looking at M&T Commercial Head Office in Centurion by Paragon Architects (Mathews, P. J. 2011, pg 168), the extensive use of this approach is striking, meshing within it new technologies and construction methods. However it remains a phenomenological approach and sculpturesque in its form, imposing on the user and dwarfing him into compliance and submission. The CSIR DST(Department of Science & Technology) Head Office in Pretoria by Bild Architects & Ether Architects (Mathews, P. J. 2011, pg 58) has a very similar approach to an extensive array of intricate and precise elements, combining aesthetics through the creation of a leitmotiv and the functionality of a designed purpose. However there was a much greater emphasis that was put into the relationship of

the structure to its occupants, creating embedded circulatory routes accessing nodal points of the building. “Emphasis was placed on the physical and visual interaction of staff members and the creation of a smart building, with particular attention to water resource utilization, solar control measures and overall energy eﬃcient innovations. Parametrics has in itself accentuated another node of importance within architecture, the aspect of sustainability, with attention to the environmental impact and use of natural means to provide tenable interiors and surroundings to the built environment and urban fabric.

Conclusion A postmodern philosophy of space would accordingly valorize the construction of domestic space and public space that would include not only new buildings and structures but new textures, sights, sounds, smells, and aesthetics, reinstating the tactile, the aural, the olfactory, and the auditory, thus aﬃrming all of the senses as key constituents of the environment. This would involve an aestheticizing of everyday life and a reconstruction of the look, feel, and experience of social space with new buildings, public spaces, nature, and forms of art appropriate to specific local regions and sites. The reconstruction of social space would involve the reintegration of nature and the social, the resurrection of the senses, and new spaces to fulfill and cultivate the many-sided needs and potentials of the human being. The postmodern aestheticizing of the environment would thus realize the earlier avant-garde aspirations for the merger of art and life and would bring architecture, sculpture, paintings, and the other forms of visual culture into a closer relationship in a reconstruction of culture and society. The Postmodern Turn (Best, Keller, 1997, pg 32) There are innumerable subtleties that currently exist within the definition and allocation of genre, style, paradigm or ethos, as the postmodern has such an all encompassing definition without any definite limitations, that any breakaway leans within its scope. That remains as the greatest challenged faced by not only architects, but almost every discipline, as each attempts to separate from the flow, yet is intrinsically embedded within it. Jameson’s (1991) notion that it is linked to society’s delay in joining up with our technical and theoretical advances seems the most applicable. Some would also see the oppressive inability for individuality to join a single entity of humanity, first and foremost, before adding interpretive particularities without them infringing, within reason, on the ideologies of other. Perhaps, the dilemma lies not in the inability to formulate a cohesive new paradigm, but rather the inescapable lack of solidarity that plagues us?

Bibliography All images taken from Mathews, P. J. (2011) Contemporary Capital; an architectural journal

Books: Flemming, W., Marien, M. W. (2005) Flemming’s Arts & Ideas. Tenth Edition. USA: Thomson Wadsworth Frampton, K. (1983) Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance. In: Foster, H. The AntiAesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture. Seattle: Bay Press Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late Capitalism. USA: Duke’s University Press Kopp, R. (2004) Baudelair:; Le soleil noir de la modernité. France: Découvertes Gallimard Lyotard, J.-F. (1979). La condition postmoderne. France: Editions de Minuit Mathews, P. J. (2011) Contemporary Capital; an architectural journal. South Africa: Visual Books

Online Resources: Best, S., Kellner, D. (1997). The Postmodern Turn. [Online] UCLA. Available from: https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/ postmodernturnch4.pdf [Accessed June 2015] Raynova, Y. (1996). Jean-Francois Lyotard: L’autre Je(u). [Online] Purdue University Indiana. Available from: http:// web.ics.purdue.edu/~smith132/French_Philosophy/Sp96/sp96_ JEAN.pdf [Accessed May 2015] Schumacher, P. (2012). Interview on Parametricism: Patrik Schumacher in conversation with Georgina Day. [Online] Available From: http://www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/On%20 Parametricism_.html [Accessed June 2015] Schumacher, P. (2014). The Impact of Parametricism on Architecture and Society Angel Tenorio interviews Patrik Schumacher. [Online] Available From: http://www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/The%20Impact%20 of%20Parametricism%20on%20Architecture%20and%20 Society.html [Accessed June 2015]

OML Class Assigned Reading: Baudrillard, J. (1981). The Beaubourg-Eﬀect: Implosion and Deterrence. University of Pretoria: OML Handout Chernus, I. Frederic Jameson’s interpretation of Postmodernism. [Class Handout] University of Pretoria. Available from: http://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus/NewspaperColumns/ LongerEssays/JamesonPostmodernism.htm Habermas, J. 1997. Modern and Post Modern architecture in Leach, N. Rethinking Architecture. A reader in cultural theory. London: Routledge

Above: CSIR Plans Middle M&T Commercial Head Oﬃce in Centurion by Paragon Architects Bottom: The CSIR DST(Department of Science & Technology) Head Oﬃce in Pretoria

REVIEW

Forthcoming book 10+ years 100+ projects Architecture in a democratic South Africa by Ora Joubert

Subsequent to perhaps the most comprehensive compendium on South African architecture to date 10+ years 100+ buildings – architecture in a democratic South Africa(Cape Town: Bell-Roberts, 2009) I decided to initiate a sequel, but documenting instead the most meritorious student dissertations of the last decade. None of these have ever been assembled and the information is increasingly getting lost. Moreover, these scholarly projects – representing the eight architecture schools in the country offering architectural tuition at a Master’s degree level – are an impressive record of our theoretical discourse within our particular socio-economic and political circumstances.

The majority of the projects by the Corobrik Student of the Year winners are included, but also work from the national contenders, as well as other dissertations that in some way or another contribute to the narrative of the book. The range of work serves as a fascinating account of South Africa’s tumultuous past, drawing attention to the vital role of architecture as vehicle for societal transformation. The making of meaningful place with limited and sustainable resources in an extraordinarily diverse context is an equally fundamental component of the current discourse, to which notions of identity and socio-cultural relevance add considerably. The book is varied in both content and graphic presentation, making for a fascinating account of the differing academic focus of respective schools. In its highly experimental and commercially unfretted form, these academic studies not

only encapsulate the socio-political discourse but markedly address the quest for a quintessential South African mode of architectural expression. The ultimate aim is that the assembly of 100 projects different will serve as a barometer of a zeitgeist and set the standard for future dissertations. Prof. ‘Ora Joubert, editor 10+ years 100+ buildings – architecture in a democratic South Africa; former Head of the Departments of Architecture, UFS and UP.

Above: People Studies by Ilze Mari Wessels, 2015

FORM AND REPRESENTATION

Midnight provides shrouds For pavement prowling; Eventually, early ash. (â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Untitledâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, 1969, Plate 23)

Colouring Within the Lines: Rothko Poems

by Georg NÖffke

The writing of a Rothko poem is a tyrannical undertaking. More restrictive even than those of the Haiku, the instructions might well be likened to a straightjacket: the poet, having apprehended and keeping in mind a particular Rothko painting, is permitted only nine words across three lines, each of these lines containing three words. Additionally, one word in every line should refer to a colour, and together the three colour-words should align in a tic-tac-toe pattern. (As an anarchic and perhaps foreboding afterthought, the poet is told that he or she may break these rules at his or her own risk.) Naturally the limitations constitute an attempt, on the level of language, to mimic Rothko’s own controlled strokes. Still, they may engender apprehension. It would not be unreasonable for a poet who is well aware of the endless open-endedness of Rothko’s work — its shifting, tonal quality, the broad, frequently brooding, many-hued weathers that resist easy description in the same way that Rothko himself resisted easy categorisation of his work — to fear that a nine-word companion poem to a painting runs the risk of thinning that painting’s import considerably. The feeling may be that words, with their inherent appeal to narrative (however vaguely articulated), will, instead of adding to, rather take away from the wordless presence and the quasimystical emanations of mood, at once modern and atavistic, that Rothko’s paintings produce. But to view the process in this light is to misconstrue the project. For text and image should exist here not in the relation of slave and master (an association suggestive, eventually, of usurpation), or even artistic co-dependence (text resentfully dependent upon image for the very fact of its creation, image resentfully dependent upon text for the specificity of its verbal elucidation). What should ideally be yielded is a paradoxical co-independence, where the text, though it has sprung into being because of the image, is able to sustain its own dimension, and where the image, an established dimension itself, can admit the appearance of another dimension beside it. And, like Wordsworth’s nuns who ‘fret not at their narrow convent’s room’, who discover that ‘the prison, into which [they] doom / [Themselves], no prison is’, or like the Imagists of the early Twentieth Century, finding in the compactness of the single image the opening of a cornucopia, so the poet may discover that the pains of poetic constriction can unloose pleasure. Each of the following Rothko poems represents an endeavour to, in Donne’s words, offer ‘a little world made cunningly’, a little world that, though wedded to another world, does not seek to talk over its reticent, mysterious partner, or even to talk up that partner, but asks only to talk to the partner, and to talk by itself.

Solar noon epiphanic, Apprehension rouges you, Tigers life’s rind. (No. 5/22, 1949)

Golden aubade, your Ocean encroaches, hues Afternoon’s bordered truce. (‘Yellow and Blue’, 1955)

Cultural Heritage: South African Statues by Inge Raubenheimer In light of recent debate regarding the removal of statues, Inge Raubenheimer generated a visual database of South African statues. The project questions whether artefacts of our past have inherent â&#x20AC;&#x153;useâ&#x20AC;? value beyond their current societal influence and makes commentary on the importance we place on symbols that convey a specific structured heritage. This research assisted in the design of a museum space to which the hypothetically removed statues would be relocated to.

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