We should invigorate our architecture with strangeness by critically participating in cultural practices like suburban gardening, the commercial disrespect for architecture and love for bad taste, informal spatial practice, expedient forms of construction …” says Heinrich Wolff.
Wolff, winner of the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Architecture 2007, is an affable, jocular man; soft around the edges, but there is no woolliness about his analysis of South African architecture or his egalitarian vision for the industry.
He feels that architecture produced in South Africa ‘runs the risk of being inaccessible, elitist and sitting uncomfortably with the people who use it”, because of a tendency to subscribe to international dialogue at the expense of local context and the negation of the familiar.
In South Africa’s post-liberation milieu, says Wolff, there is a ‘space of doubt” about the certainty of modern architecture, which provides an opportunity ‘for collective imaginations to establish relevant architecture”: an extension and expression of local cultural practice and context, whether drawn from mjondolo [shack] settlements on the Cape Flats or Roodeport shop-kitsch.
His design for Usasazo Secondary School in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, which won an International Award from Chicago Athenaeum, is an example of not merely recognising physical context (the scarcity of space in a shack settlement, the community’s use of the library and hall and the design of blocks with ‘wind shadows” to counter the southeasterly wind’s corrosiveness), but also the transformation of secondary schools to further education and training (FET) schools.
The classrooms along the street edge of the school are equipped with hatches allowing trade between the school and the community in goods and services derived from subjects such as haircare, woodwork, metalwork and appliance repair on ‘market days”.
‘National statistics show that the majority of learners from schools like Usasazo in Khayelitsha will not be formally employed after leaving school. Therefore the new FET schools will have a focus on life skills and entrepreneurial training to equip learners to create their own income. This has a radical impact on the design,” says Wolff.
The 37-year-old Wolff, a partner in Cape Town-based firm Noero Wolff Architects, also teaches in the BArch programme at the University of Cape Town and says he is concerned that students are generally ‘seduced and enthralled” by Western architectural references and have a ‘general disinterest in the world around them”.
‘The best architects are those who have a fine sense of what is happening around them, both politically and personally. At some point you have to reconcile with who you are and decide whether you want to deny your history or allow it to manifest itself in your work,” he says.
The eight nominees of the DaimlerChrysler shortlist (with one woman, Heather Dodd, and a single black architect, Ndabo Langa) are indicative of the level of transformation the industry still requires for it to articulate a newer, more relevant sense of its physical and cultural context, says the man who believes architecture is ‘an extension of oneself”.
Wolff talks about the emergence of shopping malls in Roodeport having a detrimental effect on the largely ‘Indian-dominated shops” in the town. The shopkeepers’ response was ‘continuous sales” with signs written on glass, walls and without regard for the architecture. Wolff finds this temporal engagement fascinating and, when designing Inkwenkwezi Secondary School in Du Noon, he responded to the proliferation of painted signs ‘everywhere in the community, from the Rasta to barber shops” by ‘participating in this environment” with his own signage. A huge morning star (Inkwenkwezi is Xhosa for morning star) adorns the school, while the location of the building on a sloping site was ‘exploited to develop a civic architecture that distinguishes itself from the residential fabric around it by its scale and sculptural form”.
Wolff, whose work includes Port Elizabeth’s Red Location Museum of the People’s Struggle and the Port Elizabeth Low-income Housing Project (Pelip), admits to a fascination with architecture from South America, India and the developing world, both formal and informal.
He talks enthusiastically of five- to-six-storey Latin American favelas and is critical of local government housing initiatives: ‘The most people gain from RDP houses are toilet and electricity connections. Much of the housing initiatives focus on houses as an end product; it’s about numbers rather than quality of life. There is also the assumption that people have to be moved, usually far from economic opportunities, schools and social networks and we know from experience that these situations breed unhappy communities,” he says.
The DaimlerChrysler Architecture Award Exhibition runs at the Durban Art Gallery until January 13.