Shaun de Waal
SOUTH AFRICA: A GUIDE TO RECENT ARCHITECTURE by Christina Muwanga (Ellipsis)
This exceptionally cute little book (it is a mere 10cm square, though 350 pages thick) is an excellent pocket guide to South African architecture of the last decade or so. It doesn’t go back into our history, so it lacks some context, and one misses lovely buildings such as Anstey’s in Johannesburg. But if you’re interested in the architecture of the last 10 years or so in our biggest cities and their environs, it will be invaluable.
The format is text on the left, picture on the right. Most buildings get a spread each; some get four pages in total. The pictures work surprisingly well at this reduced size, though there is perhaps an over-reliance on details.
The text, by Christine Muwanga (born in Uganda, studied in London, works partly in Cape Town) is lucid and concisely descriptive; she is pleasantly opinionated too.
The book focuses on our three major cities, and the most of the buildings are very public ones, whether civic or corporate. There is Johannesburg’s Czannesque Reserve Bank and its genteelly imposing BankCity (uniquely, BankCity architect Revel Fox gets interviewed by Muwanga, justifying his departure from hard high modernism -a welcome departure, some might say). There is Jo Noero’s brilliant Soweto Careers Centre, Cape Town’s remarkable Baxter Theatre, and Durban’s charmingly off-beat Bat Centre.
There is also, however, a fair range of private homes, and Muwanga’s attention to interstitial work such as taxi-ranks and moveable postboxes gives a vital sense of how architecture is about more than just buildings.