Research Outputs (Architecture and Planning)

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Aiton Court: Relocating Conservation between Poverty and Modern Idealism
(International committee for documentation and conservation of buildings, sites and neighbourhoods of the modern movement, 2013-01) le Roux, Hannah; Hart, Brendan; Mayat, Yasmin
Aiton Court, in Johannesburg, is a case study in how heritage and economics clash in economically constrained cities. This iconic and formally innovative Modern apartment block from 1937 is located in an area where the income levels of tenants are now very low. Although the building is protected by legislation, the viability of its restoration is being further tested by a rent boycott. The article covers the building’s history, and questions how to approach its conservation differently, given the strong demand for housing at a cost level that would be excluded by purely market–led gentrification. We propose that locating conservation strategies in relation to the building’s history and to other subsidies aimed at the public good may provide other routes to preserving Aiton Court.
Book review: The Architecture of Demas Nwoko, by John Godwin and Gillian Hopwood
(Farafina, Lagos, 2007) le Roux, Hannah
Given the challenges of access and archives, it is hard to get down to detail in the documentation of modern African architecture. This architectural monograph by Nigerian based architects John Godwin and Gillian Hopwood is a moving and meticulous catalogue of the designed work of their friend, the artist Demas Nwoko, that is refreshingly full of both architectural and anecdotal details. It begins with two short essays on Nwoko’s creative background and an analysis of his approach to design, but for the most part describes, in drawings, text and photographs, his twelve built and five unexecuted works.
PAULO JORGE GUERREIRO ESTEVES (1974–2013)
(PICASSO, 2013-11) de Klerk, Nick; Essa, Nabeel; le Roux, Hannah; Salemi, Luigi; Cox, Ryan; Esteves, Ana Maria
Paulo Esteves, who died unexpectedly of an asthma-related condition at the age of 39 at his home in July, was an architect who maintained a deep intellectual engagement with his practice. Prolific, he produced a vast number of residential projects and nature reserve lodges across South Africa in the brief 15 years that he was active. He studied at the University of Witwatersrand, graduating in 1999. Following graduation, he worked at Mashabane Rose Associates on the Apartheid Museum and at Paragon Architects, before setting up his own practice, Parallax Design Laboratory, in 2002. Throughout this period he was also a gifted pianist and baritone, which proved influential in his career as an architect.
Architecture from the frontline.
(Domus, 2008-07-31) le Roux, Hannah; Southwood, David; Duker, Rob
The photographs of Noero Wolff’s Red Location Museum suggest a post-traumatic state: all debris, dust and raw material, roaming children, and a tight, almost tense order that holds it all together. The building has striking composure, but it is the gritty setting that locates it in a compelling narrative. Noero Wolff won the commission in an open competition in 1998. The brief envisaged a museum and craft centre to celebrate South Africa’s history of struggle at its heart, in Red Location, an old township that had shown strong resistance to apartheid. The post-apartheid government developed such sites as a policy of representation: unable to bring immediate wealth to their vast numbers of impoverished supporters, it invested in symbolic projects for museums and parks that could bring the subsequent benefits of tourism.
The Congress as Architecture: modernism and politics in post-war Transvaal
(Picasso, 2007-01) le Roux, Hannah
Two significant strands of South Africa’s history - the precocious modern movement architecture of the Transvaal Group, and the political resistance that led up the Congress of the People and the Rivonia trial - remain the research subjects of quite separate disciplinary fieldsb. One of the few pieces of writing to span between the two is Rusty Bernstein’s autobiography, Memory Against Forgetting (), which traces his involvement in the political events of the 1950’s, while alluding how the theory and practice of architecture helped to support him in both material and ideological ways. Despite the optimistic title of Bernstein’s book, there is a real threat of memory loss around the way in which the events of the postwar period related to the ideals of modernity that, in both its spatial and social manifestations, was to inspire South Africa’s political transformations as late as in the 1990’s. This article revisits memories of the earlier period in order to suggest some associations between the apparently diverse areas of architectural utopianism and practice, political theory and activism, and the specific events around the planning of the Congress of the People in 1955. These associations suggest that there is an imaginative vision at the heart of modern architecture that is quite elastic, conceptually: one capable of translation into diverse manifestations, some physical, some unrealisable, and some only to be realised at another time. The article is inspired by the stories of a handful of radicalised white architects in the 1950’s, whose early formation overlaps with the emergence of the Transvaal Group. These architects, including Rusty Bernstein, Ozzy Israel, Alan Lipman, Roy Kantorowich and Clive Chipkin, studied at the University of the Witwatersrand in the late 1930’s, or in the immediate post-war period. These architects are not remembered for their designs but for the influence of their political positions on events. They were drawn to opposition politics as a way of achieving conditions of freedom and equality,conditions that would be necessary in order to implement the progressive modern architecture in foreign journals and books, including discreetly acquired copies of Architektura CCCP , that inspired them. However these conditions were not to be met in their working careers, and political events - the Sharpeville Massacre in 1961 and the Treason Trial - led them variously into exile, imprisonment, writing work and practice within the very limited circle of private clients who shared their ideals. Their most significant building, according to Clive Chipkin, was the ephemeral infrastructure that they designed and built near Soweto with hessian and timber for a political rally, the Congress of the People, in 1955. This event launched the Freedom Charter, a list of fundamental social demands including access to housing, schools and freedom of association, and in turn, in the 1990’s, became the basis for the spatial ideals of the new nation of post-apartheid South Africa. Rusty Bernstein played central roles in organising both the space and the written text of the Freedom Charter. The Congress architects’ political activities contrast with mainstream architectural activity, which was largely supportive of the capitalist apartheid state. To trace this history, it was necessary to use personal narratives as evidence, in the absence of a drawn or built archive: indeed, this may be a rare case in architectural history where the paper archive was swallowed in the face of a police raid. In its motives, this article, as well as paying tribute to a generation whose political choices led to personal hardship, tries to broaden the limits of architectural discourse to include not only built products but also their rebus, their exclusions. It suggests that what is not able to be realised does not necessarily disappear, but rather, might be translated into some other mode. Seeing the Congress as architecture draws attention to the other modernisms of the imagination that cross between transnational boundaries, between conditions of the built and the unbuildable.

Research Outputs (Architecture and Planning)

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