There’s little point in talking about the weather in Southern Africa. Winter clouds rarely make the forecast, with the sun seemingly arriving larger than it did the day before and with a relentlessness matching only the emptiness and beauty of the landscape. Narratives are super-tough here, for this is somewhere many have travelled to but also a place many have travelled from. Out of Africa exchange rates these days have none of the weight of those colonial mining suitcases and, today, South Africa is packing short at least two million houses. That, according to the United Nations, “leaves some 12 million people in dire need of hous[ing]”.¹ Such altitudes take some climbing. So, before giving a masterclass to the South African Institute of Architects and a professorial lecture at the University of the Free State as part of Africa’s first PhD through Creative Practice programme, I buckle into a very small car with legendary South African architect Peter Rich, rev the experience past four thousand and go looking for rainbows.

“Architecture is people and realities” our five-day conversation begins as we drive through J’burg, past the world’s largest pot of gold that reefed some three kilometres underground and now lies emptied. We head into the township of Alexandra to see a building Rich designed more than 20 years ago. It’s worth journeying to see, being “built on either side and on top of a busy street”² as Lonely Planet describes. Miraculously, it can still be found, for it’s easy to lose buildings amongst a need for shelter and materials. Architecture dispatched here is readily burnt, pulled down or transplanted piece by piece.

Yet, Rich’s Alexandra Heritage Centre bridges a way to some kind of immortality and sits without visible sequence, when each element or the building itself arrived is as ambiguous as the fabric of its community. So, too, are the signatures that increasingly graffiti the stonework walls as some kind of thanks for listening. Here’s a rainbow, and Rich is treated as such as we wander the neighbourhood and experience an informal vitality, free from the rulings of city planners. The streets here are scaled with active edges, sheltering courtyards and the innate generosity that comes from people having to sort things out on their own. But it’s tough and experience here is everything. As we drive out of the township, there are some official-looking uniforms standing on the road waving us to where we might imagine a kerb. Hold-up! and we floor-it out onto the freeway. “Police here have cars,” I’m told. Getting in and out of anywhere in South Africa takes some effort.

It’s not long in African time (the next day) before things start arriving. Ant hills turn into the mountains of the Great Karoo in some kind of slow-moving frontseat theatre. By the time we climb up to the Valley of Desolation, we are in some of the oldest tabletop mountains in the world and looking out over plains of epic distance and who knows what? Baboons for sure: I can hear them. “Lions?” I ask, as I re-tuck my pants into my socks in some kind of we-can-walk-barefoo-tin-our-forests paranoia. Rich just laughs; he’s the lion. When we arrive at the next settlement, with its South African stereotypical formalised front and informal back, he leans on a fence and oxymorons an answer: “You’ll need to go to a game park.”

It is for these discussions on spatial freedoms that, after first visiting urban Alexandra, Rich has brought me into the hinterland. His friends and heroes Pancho Guedes and BV Doshi have ridden along with us, in absentia, to remind us that freedoms architecturally find voice through collectivity. Whether house, church or theatre, it is hard to be any kind of neighbour behind a fence that a giraffe wouldn’t dare stretch to look over for all that high-voltage barbed wire at 15 feet. If there’s irony in connecting residential fencing to an impenetrable urban grid, there are also lessons in participating with context.

In the middle of nowhere, we find little sheds bordering the freeway and running at what looks like 30-metre spacings all the way to the horizon. A house is a house and, perhaps, relief and improvements come with time. But, without insulation, services, industry or anything at all between buildings, it’s hard to talk. Emptiness is also a fence and the only people to be seen are walking along the road.

But there’s also housing that breathes with its landscape through clever design and age-old patterns to settlement. Openstudio Architects’ Swartberg House with its stucco-ed inside and out plan is a standalone private house, which is both open and closed, and, opens and closes. Without any mechanical heating or cooling, its shuttered thermal-mass vernacular is, as London-based architect and owner Jennifer Beningfield tells me, designed to be “driven” with the desert sun and wind. In Lesotho, with architect Lefu Namane, I visit simple thatched and mud round houses and their more contemporary, corrugated-iron and cinder-block rectilinear alternatives. No matter its shape, each shares space with its neighbours. When we get a flat tyre, someone runs to the next village to fetch glue. Such connections have evolved in their groupings of buildings. While waiting, we happily chat in the space between houses. “An African house is a village,” as Rich puts it. There’s more to life without fences; there’s conversation.

So, to Bloemfontein and an architectural education being voiced at the University of the Free State. We start with my masterclass, where we investigate the ways in which architects might innovate to develop means of contributing in the local context. What questions might be asked? What briefs might be written? There are rich pickings for there’s much to do in a city plan that still looks remarkably similar to a former life 30 years ago. With little money available for anything, finding an architecture that tackles problems and gets around fences is golden.

Around 500 architects from all over Southern Africa have congregated for the Sophia Gray Memorial Lecture and Exhibition, which, this year, is presented by André Eksteen and Braam de Villiers of Pretoria’s Earthworld Architects. Their exhibition traces their prototyping of larger-format timber into the African architectural palette. I wonder where reducing scales might lead in designing forest-like quantities of housing. My masterclass is a full house of almost a hundred and, on the way, I meet some young African students who bravely come and present their thinking. Their emerging voice is proud and important, for, as they note, extraordinary efforts have been made by many people to get them here. They are also clever and suggest opening the nexus between the two sides of town through inhabitation. They propose widening rather than narrowing. It’s inclusive and fenceless.

The same students bring many friends and classmates to my professorial lecture. Don’t expect questions afterwards, I’m politely told beforehand — the questions run as long as the lecture did and then longer still after. “We take every opportunity,” these young Africans tell me.

I see them again over the next week as I critique PhDs from all around Africa in a programme, established and led by Jonathan Noble, which is attracting architectural minds from all directions. My student friends are looking and learning, as is the doctoral research which seeks a refinding of place and narrative. There’s research into African myth-making, African informal urbanism and, even, African airports. As Guedes, whose artwork adorns the walls, initiated, “I claim for architects the rights and liberties that painters and poets have held for so long.”³ People help people and architecture helps architecture.

So, here’s to education not just chasing rainbows but studying how to find them. “Shap shap!” I say in some good township slang for ‘cool’ and pronounced with a suitably long Southern African ‘A’ for ‘Arrrrrchitecture’. Architecture grades to meaning more than just what is built. For architecture, like community, is never about gold, but voice.

References

^{1 Ernest Harsch, ‘Winding path to decent housing for South Africa’s poor’, United Nations General Assembly, 79th Session. un.org/ africarenewal/ web-features/ winding-pathdecent- housingsouth- africa’spoor Accessed 17.11.2024.}

^{2 ‘Alexandra Heritage Centre’, Lonely Planet. lonelyplanet. com/southafrica/ gauteng/ johannesburg/ attractions/ alexandraheritagecentre/ a/poisig/ 1620264/ 355617 Accessed 17.11.2024.}

^{3 Peter Cook, ‘Pancho Guedes (1925– 2015)’, The Architectural Review. architecturalreview. com/ essays/ reputations/ panchoguedes- 1925- 2015 27 March 2012.}