Tom Quoin : Architecture
We will soon have a home for our Constitutional Court. If construction proceeds as expected, it should be ready for occupation early in the year 2000. The building will stand on the upper reaches of the newly named Constitution Hill, north of the painfully memorable Fort, Johannesburg.
It will overlook the menacing prison blocks known as sections four and five, with their brutal and brutalising solitary confinement cells. Humane justice will, we must hope, take root in this place of fearful recall.
There has been a great deal of committed work to get to this point. First the government’s bold decision to make this, rather than the customary lump of statuary, its initial sortie into built structures that celebrate democratic liberation.
Then its allocation of public service and other personnel to administer, sponsor and make proposals for advancing the project; people who began by choosing, among a number of possibilities, a symbolically suitable site.
That done, there were consultations about how to realise the project; principally about ensuring a distinctively designed building. An open, international competition was suggested and accepted; as was a panel of nine jurors, two of whom are especially honoured in world architectural circles.
A booklet explaining the conditions and brief for the competition was applied for by some 500 prospective competitors, many of whom wrote from outside South Africa. They were responding to widely advertised notices that announced and invited applications for entry to the competition.
Each applicant was sent a description of the submissions required and, as the first phase of the exercise, asked to present key design concepts for the site as a whole plus their proposed new building.
The jury selected five of these conceptual outlines for the next phase: preparing illustrative sketch-plans for the court and its immediate landscaping. A winning design was drawn from this handful of developed projects. That is where we are now.
The brief consists mainly of five tables of requirements, each with a list of accommodation. These consist of a schedule of the public areas, of the court chamber and its facilities, of the library and public reading-room, of the judges’ rooms – including two researchers’ offices for each of 12 justices – and, last, an inventory of administrative spaces.
All this was, perhaps not unexpectedly, cast in the hierarchical rankings characteristic of civil servants. The cleaners’ rest room is, for example, to be less than a quarter the size of the office for the President of the Constitutional Court. At a gross area of well over 9 000m2 these far from egalitarian schedules point to a large complex.
What, in two years, are we likely to encounter when visiting this, the first significant new building of our recent democracy?
It will certainly live up to its practical and symbolic purposes … and more. The winners – OMM Design Workshop, Durban and Urban Solutions from Johannesburg – submitted a joint entry of unusual analytic depth, of humane dignity, of inventive response to an historic highveld site and its built precincts. South African architects who, in the future, bypass this promising contemporary precedent will probably remain fixed in their current preoccupations with crass borrowings from abroad and flabby imitations of our home- grown traditions.
Unlike the other four finalists, the winning scheme is not a monolithic structure; one that must be shoehorned into the site. On the contrary, the new accommodation is to be split, fragmented. Much like the cell blocks of Section Four, it comprises a series of pavillions subtly linked by covered and uncovered ways, by open and enclosed courtyards, by internal and perimeter “streets” stepped paths and public plazas.
This ensemble is slotted into the existing built framework with skilful attention to the existing buildings, the sloping site and, particularly, the flat upper plane on which the court room – the place of public judicial debate – will be located.
Visitors, the public, will move through a varied urban landscape of court buildings that alternate with squares, footways and courtyards containing carefully selected, chiefly indigenous, trees and other planting.
The designers have housed elements that attract communal activity – those, like the constitutional exhibition foyer, that call for general access – on the edges of the paths and similar open spaces. The place should buzz with life; without, though, impeding the administrative traffic on which effective, efficient court life depends.
There will also be private places; like the judges’ cloister with its colonnades of lofty trees and its secluded, contemplative corners.
At root, the design consists of a succession of built and open spaces, of solid and void juxtapositions. It is not a grand, a singular object to be appreciated fully at a distance; it is not a private, aloof, autocratic building.
It is, rather, an inviting setting of wholly and partially enclosed spaces; places to be grasped and appreciated as one progresses along its many routes, each with distinctive but related character, materials, details. This is no Kafkaesque castle, no bureaucratic citadel. Its promise lies in a designed potential for democratic, participatory use.
That democratic impulse pervades the development: from its ready accessibility through to its many implicit symbols; such as the evocative “cage tower”, which the designers have placed on axis with the upper-level court house. Here, the sentry boxes at the ramparts of the old Fort will be represented by a large quasi watch- tower, an emblem of Abe Lincoln’s dictum: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” We must watch our rights and our judges.
Together, the two major commitments that underpin the design – firmly democratic fragmentation and insistence on vernacular materials, crafts, arts, construction processes, methods of climatic control, indigenous planting – form the foundation on which this searching, brilliantly resolved project rests.
Together, they highlight a third, a similarly weighty issue, aesthetic confidence. If the project is built as presently planned, we should have a quite splendid constitutional complex. Not a fiery display of architectural gymnastics, but a humane, restrained, relaxed setting where all but the most aesthetically inert might find comfort, stimulation, places for thoughtful reflection as well as active public life.
That, in our present state of architectural banality, will be no small feat.