Culturally significant architecture in post‐apartheid South Africa is neither radical nor
groundbreaking. Nor is it, apart from occasional nods toward Norberg‐Schulz and phenomenology,
particularly theoretically driven. It certainly does not have ‘space’ or ‘form’ as its ambition. Rather than being concerned with the discipline and history of architecture itself, its focus is, quite simply, people. This is hardly surprising. Apartheid, as a policy and an ideology, was primarily focused on dehumanising its subjects – which the post‐apartheid policy of ubuntu aims to put right. Since the highly politicised 1980s, architects have been trying to use their designs to reconstruct broken people and broken environments, to provide ‘dignified places’ – to solve the problems of apartheid through the very physicality of architecture. It is an architecture of restitution, an armature for ubuntu, and it locates itself in the tradition of ‘soft modernism’, from Aalto through Alexander to Van Eyck.

Is it possible, 20 years since the ‘end’ of apartheid, to be critical of this mode of cultural
production? Is it fair to question why a land of radicals has not produced a radical architecture? Certainly, at the theoretical level, we need to be aware of the homology between apartheid’s use of modernism in instrumentalising its policy of a ‘separate development’ and the use of ‘soft‐modernism’ in an attempt to ameliorate the devastating effects of that policy – effective or not, they are both examples of social‐spatial engineering. But can a sharper critique be made through analysis of particular ‘against apartheid’ buildings?

Taking the idea of ‘armature’ as its starting point, this paper will examine recurring models,
types and systems in recent South African architecture that, in serving ‘the people’, place limits on architecture and its possibilities. The predominance of ergonomics as the starting point of design – of understanding people as generic models rather than unique individuals – has unsettling resonances with apartheid policies. The idea of ‘armature’ will also illustrate how a moral voice limits the use of architecture’s resources and establishes the tectonic rather than the spatial as the default mode of architectural production. Again, this understanding of architecture as the deployment of a system of ready‐made structural components has disturbing resonances with the totalising system of apartheid itself. In the ‘bare bones’ method of the tectonic approach – where architecture is the armature that people ‘round off’ and ‘thicken out’ through their bodies – architecture becomes strangely self‐effacing and at times wholly absent, its leading exponents actively championing the erasure of its unique value. By assembling architecture through the components of the generic, the model, the modular, the ergonomic – another iteration of the tectonic strategy – rather than the particular, the unusual, the unique, we lose sight of the libidinal potential of architecture for both its subjects and its objects and limit architecture’s potential to transcend the known and the now.

Nic Coetzer, University of Cape Town, ZA

Nic.Coetzer@uct.ac.za

Architecture is (arguably) defined by its relationship with wider social, economic and philosophical ideas and theories; from the advent of modernism through to post-modern/structural/colonial theories. At their most demonstratively provocative / powerful / disruptive, theoretical discourse is used to underpin architectural movements through the objectification / abstraction of an idea or even a theoretician (i.e. Deleuzian architecture) and the mis-translation of theory (metaphysical / social / cultural) into a fetishism of marketable aesthetics.

Yet whilst these reductive occurrences might be equally critiqued as frustrating, mis-guided or ironic, they do pose a provocative question; why do some theories become economic and aesthetic idols, and others do not?

In political and economic contexts that aren’t / weren’t (yet) defined by Lefebvre’s ‘abstract space’ of economic and exchange value structures, development practitioners such as Turner and Hamdi have explored an opportunity to re-interpret the purpose of architecture through an engagement with ideas of periphery and ‘the outsider’. Without an explicitly hegemonic political and socio-economic projection of aesthetics and values, architecture is / was able to engage with contexts and perceptions of ‘the other’ – in terms of the relative value of aesthetics, architectural built form, people and cultural contexts respectively. This (re)interpretation of space implicitly runs counter to the same social, economic and political machinations that Lefebvre’s discourse sought to expose and critique.

Based on this analysis, I contend that the principles of development practices suggest an architecture that can be conceived, perceived (and practiced) as a verb, whilst in mainstream architectural practice (and education) it endures as only a noun – an aestheticised object of exchange. In our (supposedly) developed post-industrial societies, the hegemony of ‘abstract space’ and its fragmented perceptions / projections of space and value has made the appropriation of differential spaces and aesthetics a historical platitude and not the simple, everyday reality or aspiration for life that it can / must be.

I contend that the work of Turner can be considered dialectically as a practical exploration of the ideas of Lefebvre and his critique of economic and political structures of space. Similarly, Hamdi’s work reflects aspects of Massey’s discourse on the implications of multiplicity and specificity in a global context.

In contrast to Deleuzian (and other) architectural movements, the ethical emphasis of Turner and Hamdi’s architecture and discourse induce an appropriation, and subsequently an aesthetic of space that is inherently outside architectural control and authorship.

And yet, given the documented socio-economic success of both Turner and Hamdi’s work respectively, and the theoretical and ethical links that can be drawn to the work of the theoretical paradigms of Lefebvre and Massey, why is it that such an architecture remains marginalized as merely an idea for the ‘developing world’?

Richard Bower, University of Plymouth, UK

richard.bower@plymouth.ac.uk