Building the Rainbow Nation. The role of architecture in a post-apartheid identity (original) (raw)
Related papers
Space and Transformation: The Struggle for Architecture in Post Apartheid South Africa
Afrika Focus
The title and this essay, ‘Space and Transformation – the struggle for architecture in post-apartheid South Africa’ derive from the 2nd Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture delivered in Ghent in 2015. Its source as my topic is located in the intersection of three interrelated trajectories. The most obvious is the issue of my disciplinary grounding and the locus of intellectual thought, that of architecture and the complexity associated with the production of space, particularly under conditions of change. The other is the life work and philosophical teaching of this extraordinary man Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela and the third is the condition of the world, and South Africa in particular, as we experience it today at what appears to be this unique historic intersectional moment of globalization and expansive tech- nological shift within our nations’ democratic emergence. The essay draws on texts derived from other disciplines, such as literature and philosophy, particularly those that have rel...
The homogenising influence of the ‘melting pot’ aesthetic of an American ideal – experienced as much in South Africa as it is globally –would insist that our constructed spaces become, essentially, a-historical. Meanwhile, the criteria for ‘what makes a good building’ is further impacted upon by the lauded tradition of European architecture. In renegotiating, and re-imaging, the future role of the humanities in Africa, it becomes imperative that this process looks to renegotiating the very ways in which we create the physical spaces that surround and influence us daily in our lived and felt experiences. With this in mind, this paper emphasises the importance of designing buildings that are valued both for their formal elements in as much as they are for the societal relevance their design reflects, resonating with the diverse and complex South African peoples that will make these spaces their place of living. Hereafter, it argues the need for the implementation of new criteria for buildings in the field of architectural studies that will encourage students to actively participate in the multiplicitous national identit(y/ies) speaking specifically for the South African dynamic, rather than pandering to the prerequisites of form and style that once colonised our sense of home. Though our identity is in the process of re-imagination, there is still a shared (in part) trajectory that has brought all of us, as South Africans, to this particular moment in our country’s history. As such, this alone speaks for the fact that there is a ‘South African experience’, although it will always be nuanced and difficult to articulate. But this is not to discourage us from trying, and in this, architects can seek to ‘articulate’ new post-apartheid spaces for living that operate in dialogue with our country’s re-imagining.
Current trends in South African architecture and the way to the future
South African Journal of Art History, 2009
Few countries have ever had the opportunity to rethink their architectural dogma as abruptly and radically as South Africa since the few years leading up to the democratic elections of 1994. With only a few exceptions, the pre-democratic South African architecture of the 20th century has always lacked a unique identity. But, coinciding with trends towards Critical-Regionalism and 'green' initiatives, the emergence of a new South Africa has inspired the profession as a whole to search for new directions. Hedendaagse tendense in Suid-Afrikaanse argitektuur en die weg na die toekoms Net enkele lande het ooit die geleentheid gehad om hul argitektoniese dogma so plotseling en radikaal te heroorweeg as Suid-Afrika in die paar jare voor die demokratiese verkiesing van 1994. Met slegs enkele uitsonderings het die voor-demokratiese Suid-Afrikaanse argitektuur nog altyd aan 'n unieke identiteit ontbreek. Maar saamvallend met tendense na 'Critical-Regionalism' en 'groen...
1999
A RCHITECTURE IN SOUTH AFRICA has, until recently, been marked by a noticeable absence of debates about its politics. blank Architecture, apartheid and after is a collection of essays edited by curator and architect Hilton Judin and writer Ivan Vladislaviae, which responds to this absence. This ambitious book brings together architects, urban planners, curators, academics, journalists, writers, artists, and photographers to examine legacies of colonial and apartheid spatial planning and the built environment. The collection includes over forty written and photographic essays, most of which are short and concise. The textual essays range in voice and tone; some are personal, written in the spirit of memoir and cultural criticism, while others-especially those dealing with architectural history-are more technical and specialized. As an anthropologist, it is the former that I found most compelling; subjects range from crime and the restriction of public space (Lindsay Bremner), to an examination of the ambiguities of being a black tourist visiting a colonial game lodge (Njabulo Ndebele). It is to the editors' credit that this book opens up the field of architecture in such imaginative ways, blank also includes numerous archival photographs, such as images of white male architects admiring modernist buildings and plans for depressingly monotonous native townships. These historical images contrast sharply with the contemporary photos of everyday life in South Africa. But blank is not an easy book to negotiate, since it has numerous systems of cross-referencing. Rather than refer to page numbers, the table of contents is displayed on a map; the reader sees, for instance, that a piece by Achmat Dangor is located at "FIO," while another by David Bunn is at "C4." Looking at the map, we see that essays clustered in the FIO area focus on themes of forced removals, while the C4 area is situated amongst those of fortification and commemoration. Following this map of contents, there is also a list of vocabulary called "Positions," where words such as buffer zone, motorway, and vulnerable are briefly described and linked to various essays. Sometimes the effect is ironic or provocative. For instance, under "Afrikaans" one finds the self-satisfied words of N.P. van Wyk Louw, quoted from the 1966 South African
Dramaturgias do Real, 2019
First published as: Opper, A. Breaking Johannesburg’s architectural fourth wall: An interrogation of three façade-conditions as interstitial sites of appearance, reality and possibility. In M. Toledo Silva (Ed). Dramaturgias do Real: 59-89. Impressões de Minas: Belo Horizonte. ABSTRACT: This paper highlights and compares – in the context of Johannesburg – the entrenched planning and architectural roles played by line, boundary and territory. Specifically, it demonstrates how these conceptions of division are activated and reinforced via the ostensibly harmless device of the architectural façade. Newer façades tend to be scripted and older facades re-scripted not as interfaces of assimilation and accessibility, but as often paranoid and inherently opaque surfaces. Such façades, via obstructive and filtering tendencies, stand in the service of keeping post-apartheid South African (SA) society as unequal as it is notorious for being (even 25 years after the country’s celebrated transition to ‘democracy’). ISBN: 978-85-63612-60-1 The paper serves as an analysis of some of the ways in which façades are mobilised as power-laden devices of separation. The text will also make clear the complicity of the mainstream architectural profession in the continuing proliferation of façades as codified separators of a SA society; a society already so damaged by apartheid’s pervasive and deeply architecturally inscribed legacies of political, social, economic and race-based engineered separation. Newer forms of constructed notions of ‘reasons’ for separation have emerged from SA’s general and problematic insistence on treating cultural and geographic differences with suspicion. In this vein, xenophobia has manifested in different degrees since an extreme flare-up of this phenomenon in the widely publicised events of 2008. Gentrification, of as much concern in the global south as it is in the global north, is another constructor of difference hinging on the façade as a differentiating filter, an included or excluder. A discussion of three iterations of the façade condition – attached to different scales, typologies, urban and suburban contexts – shows how these ‘skins’ of buildings do not, however, have to remain irrevocably stuck in the above paradigm of separating and isolating. Façades are able to be mobilised – even reconfigured – via a combination of layers of design and performativity, as instructive, generative and inclusive thresholds of productive architectural undoing. The context for this argument is provided by my role as, one the one hand, critical spatial practitioner and, on the other, educator at the University of Johannesburg. The education of young architects-in-the-making offers a valuable opportunity to build counter-identities and - roles for architects, as empathetic practitioners. Such a reformulation of the traditionally entrenched heroic architectural habitus equips architects with an attitude which enables them to confidently challenge the heavy hand of what SA’s largely developer-driven market ‘expects’ architects to blindly deliver. Generally, this developer-led mode means that SA’s built environments, and the architects who design these, succumb to dumbed-down monolithic neoliberal expectations of what developers believe cities should look like and how participation in them is defined (often around notions of exclusion, rather than much needed social dialogue and universal access to spaces). The three chosen projects – although specific to their respective contexts – lend themselves to comparison and to relational readings, through and across each other. They challenge the generally lazy ways in which architects, serving the dominant neoliberal urban model, cop-out of the opportunities façades offer. Façades can namely serve as far more inclusive, participative, intelligent and truly democratic interfaces of a society still in crisis because of the narrow ways in which it defines and codifies binaries such a ‘poverty’ and ‘wealth’ and ‘belonging’ and ‘not-belonging’. This analysis and presentation of three carefully chose case studies highlights the problematic and continued failure of architecture to address persisting antisocial neoliberalist tendencies of exclusion. At the same time though it demonstrates that, via the vehicles of architectural education and artistic practice, the façade is able to act as a site of radically social possibilities. ISBN: 978-85-63612-60-1
Integration and Transformation of Post-Apartheid South African City Fabric
2010
1 ABSTRACT This paper focuses on attempts to reconfigure spaces in post-apartheid South African cities. The fusion of modernist planning ideologies with racial elaborations during the apartheid era up until the end of apartheid in the early 1990s in the planning of South African cities left them with dysfunctional and segregated spaces. Apartheid cities became synonymous to urban decay, low densities and spatial segregation of different racial groups and land uses with residential areas of poor city residents located at the urban periphery away from socio-economic opportunities. With the advent of democracy in South Africa there have been many serious minded attempts to reorganise and redefine spaces in post-apartheid South African cities with the aim of promoting regeneration, high densities, mixed land uses, spatial integration and hybridity. However, more than 15 years down the line since the inception of such initiatives, spatial segregation and dsyfunctionality still hounds Sou...