If architecture is to be understood and accepted as a valid part of South Africa’s cultural production, it urgently requires a more sophisticated and refined context of debate. The need for debate applies in equal measure to architecture as a practice, and to buildings and cities as a form of culture.
There have been only two events of architecture forcing their way into the printed media and the public eye over the past few years. The first involved a Dutch Reformed Church’s phallic tower and a pastor’s wife, the other was the well-publicised tolling of the death bell on the Tuscan style about a year ago. In professional circles, self-criticism is too prevalent and the obsession with debates of style is getting us into uninteresting corners. Surely this is not enough.
The only major international and local exhibition of architecture, “Blank_architecture, apartheid and after” dealt with architects’ complicity in apartheid, but did not speculate about how this same profession could be relevant in a differently constructed social reality.
International interest in South African cities and the cultural production of South African architects is growing.
Johannesburg-based sharpCITY (www.sharpcity.co.za) has been producing international exhibitions on South African architecture and cities. Since 2000, our team has produced critical contributions to the Venice Biennale, the Vienna Architecture Centre, the Aedes Gallery in Berlin and the Sao Paulo Biennale in 2003 and 2005. Our latest offering is, for a change, launched in South Africa — a book on contemporary South African architecture, which is published by Double Storey in Cape Town. The book is an attempt to frame a broader and more inclusive debate about what is relevant and important in South African architectural production. It also explicitly celebrates examples of excellent production and practice, and posits the argument that the best contemporary work is based on a love for and understanding of the particular landscapes of South Africa.
In contrast to the saturated cultural landscapes of the “developed world” the South African landscape is raw, primal, overwhelming and vast in its relative emptiness. This almost utopian beauty conceals the fault lines of social and political complexity that cross the natural and man-made South African terrain.
After 11 years of democracy, South Africa retains its scars, bearing witness to the undercurrent of tension of an all too recent past of separation, discrimination and isolation.
Yet the cities are landscapes of desire and people magnets. The rifts of social and political complexity do not tear them apart. Democratic, racially de-legislated cities attract waves of rural immigrants and fortune-seekers from all over Africa. Capitalism and informality are contesting the city from opposing poles of need and desire. Far from a generally projected utopian project of architecture and urbanism, meaningful architectural interventions remain scarce, representing points of acupuncture releasing the built-up tension in a landscape in transition.
Globally, South Africa shares the challenges of massive and rapid urbanisation with other cities, and produces cities that are horizontally extending and anti-urban. On the edge of central concerns, on the edge of mainstream culture, or to use a popular phrase, “edge culture”, fringe, fusion, post-, South Africa is united by the promise that lives in diversity.
Architects work in the ethical realm, on the dividing edge between commitment to meaningful change and the perpetuation of inherited patterns. The profession is often complicit in physically entrenching separation brought about by ignorance and paranoia. At other times, through new building types, through new relationships to history, through critical interpretations of landscape and place, or through the way in which work is procured and produced with and for communities, architects are managing to confront change creatively and bring about change through their work.
Relevant architectural practice finds ways of embracing informality and difference by exploring the spaces and uses of an emerging democratic reality. Perhaps the criteria for interrogating current architectural practice is the extent to which practitioners, working in a volatile and charged environment, are finding beauty in necessity and making the necessary beautiful.
Striving for a better, more ideal, perhaps utopian world, we aim higher and win lower. While doing so, we need to celebrate the great, bitterly fought for, contaminated fragments of utopia which have been produced in a landscape of conflict and opportunity. Utopia is nowhere, but close.
sharpCITY was formed by Johannesburg-based architects Thorsten Deckler, Anne Graupner and myself as a vehicle for developing new knowledge about the past, present and future of cities. Our exhibitions have become a form of contemporary storytelling about the dramatic changes sweeping through the urban and semi-urban landscapes of South Africa.
Currently, sharpCITY is launching an open design competition for a mobile or roving, temporary event unit for film screenings and performances. Our next field of interest is the use and abuse of public space in South African cities, and speculative projects aimed at changing the way ordinary people use the city.
The design competition can be found at www.designcomp.co.za.
The details
Contemporary South African Architecture by Thorsten Deckler, Anne Graupner and Henning Rasmuss will be launched at the Design Indaba on Friday February 24 at 4pm in the Press Lounge at the Design Indaba at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.
To book your seat e-mail Mary Jearey at [email protected] or call (011) 704 1107