An exhibition of the work of architect Roelof Uytenbogaardt is a nostalgic tribute to South Africa’s most significant urban thinker Melinda Silverman The dark, 17th-century Dutch interior of the Old Town House in Cape Town houses a reverential exhibition of the work of Roelof Uytenbogaardt, modern South African architecture’s master of lightness and space. But it’s what happens out on the stoep that is a more pointed illustration of the principles of Uytenbogaardt’s work. The Town House overlooks one of Cape Town’s busiest public places, Greenmarket Square: two elegant women field cellphone calls while nibbling sandwiches; an ageing hippy sips herbal tea; three streetchildren groom one another with an obvious relish for every louse encountered; and on the square beyond, foreign tourists haggle over African curios, while lunch-hour traffic pushes through the pedestrian throngs. It is these public places, according to Uytenbogaardt, which accommodate the diversity and activity that we associate with urban life, and it is these public spaces which should structure future city plans. Unfortunately, it is precisely these older, more traditional public areas that are being eroded every day by newer urban forms. Greenmarket Square remains an exception in a city increasingly dominated by freeways, parking lots, office parks, gated residential communities, shopping malls and a network of quasi-public spaces where right of admission would inevitably exclude the urchins and the ageing hippy. Uytenbogaardt, who died two years ago at 65, was one of the country’s most admired architects, head of the architecture school at the University of Cape Town, founder of the influential and productive urban problems research unit and author of various manifestos on architecture and urban design that continue to underpin the principles of most South African local authorities. Uytenbogaardt was a curious mixture: as an architect, he was an uncompromising modernist, his buildings light and airy, his materials usually bare concrete, unadorned brick, exposed timber and glass. But as an urban theorist he was an almost romantic traditionalist, inspired by the village square and the medieval community. Uytenbogaardt’s legacy looms large over current urban thinking in South Africa. His ideas are explicitly embodied in the new Municipal Spatial Development Framework for the City of Cape Town – which acknowledges Uytenbogaardt in a dedication on the back page – and implicitly in the spatial framework for Greater Johannesburg, which similarly advocates a system of open spaces attached to significant public buildings, three and four-storey flats and an interconnected network of local neighbourhoods.
The need for higher residential densities, active streets and public squares are the daily mantras of planners and urban designers. But they fly in the face of current urban conditions. Public space is no longer the building block of cities, but merely the land that is left over between private buildings. Local governments have few opportunities or resources to shape cities, succumbing to the demands of private speculators. Well-located, high-density public housing is a receding dream in cities surrounded by burgeoning shack settlements on their outer edges. The exhibition should therefore raise critical questions about these issues. Unfortunately, it does not. As a result, it can be interpreted only as an elegy, as a nostalgic tribute to South Africa’s most significant urban thinker. Uytenbogaardt cannot be held responsible for the reverential attention of his colleagues, but it helps to separate his own work from those who follow in his wake. And this exhibition does indeed demonstrate, more often than not, Uytenbogaardt’s own mastery in the design of buildings and the spaces that surround them.
In a renovation to an existing cemetery in Simonstown, Uytenbogaardt uses a public pathway linking the town to the sea as the major design element. Small terraces accommodating the graves of those who died at sea lead off this main public access- way allowing the cemetery to function simultaneously as a place of remembrance and an actively used public park. Further down the stairs, the path widens out to accommodate a seat and a sculptural wave-shaped wall which subtly links the cemetery to the sea beyond.
In Belhar (1985), a low-income housing scheme outside Cape Town, a series of semi-public courtyard spaces, distinguish this scheme from the undifferentiated monotonous streetscape of other “matchbox” projects. Here modest one- and two-storey houses are built close to the street and cluster around small squares. This allows both a modicum of privacy and the opportunity to participate in the larger public life of the city.
This subtle interrelationship between public and private informs Uytenbogaardt’s design for the Hout Bay Library (1991). Public areas are accommodated under a lofty, elaborate tree-like roof structure suffused with light, while the more intimate reading rooms are smaller and more cosy, contained by bookshelves and low walls. The space outside the building functions both as a parking area and as a shaded court for weekend markets and book festivals. It is telling that Uytenbogaardt’s least successful scheme was the one in which he did attempt to directly confront a contemporary urban form: the suburban shopping centre. The Werdmuller Centre in Claremont is designed as a deliberate alternative to the enclosed mall. The major design element is an unrelenting ramp, leading shoppers ever upwards to a rooftop terrace where they might indulge in views of the mountain. But this building proved a commercial disaster and its concrete brutalism made it amongst Cape Town’s most-hated structures. Werdmuller could not compete with other malls, which at least offered protection from Cape Town’s temperamental climate, an ambiance of joyous consumption and some choice as to which routes to use. While the Werdmuller Centre is a blip in an otherwise glorious career trajectory, it points to a failing unacknowledged by the architectural press in its hagiographic treatment of Uytenbogaardt’s work – and in this exhibition. This failing lies in accepting Uytenbogaardt’s claim that it is possible to make a timeless architecture – an architecture that transcends its own political, social and economic context. Any sensitive architect – and Uytenbogaardt was indeed among the most sensitive – working in the context of apartheid South Africa, could not but realise that space is irretrievably shaped by its social context.
Uytenbogaardt’s own projects function only as rare poetic moments in an otherwise debilitating environment – but are no less worthy of our admiration. However, a planning philosophy which self-consciously chooses to ignore contemporary realities is an unstable foundation on which to build planning practice for the future. Roelof S Uytenbogaardt: Architect-Urbanist-Educator 1933-1998 is on at Old Town House, Greenmarket Square, Cape Town until August 17. His work can also be seen on the exhibition blank_ Architecture, apartheid and after at MuseuMAfricA, Newtown, Johannesburg until January 2001