Forget Europe, Forget America: Architecture and Apartheid

Abstract

The following essay was originally commissioned for the 1986 Evening Lecture Series at the University of Waterloo.

This article deals with the predicament of architecture and architects under apartheid. It has been said that “South Africa would be the ideal place to practice architecture, if it were not for the political situation.” In some ways, this ironic statement seems true; but might not these ideal conditions be directly related to the conditions created by apartheid? What does this imply about our notions of “ideal conditions”? Is a radical practice possible and effective? Is a conventional practice necessarily co-opted to the ends of the state? What transformations in symbolic reading have occurred within formal vocabularies adopted from non-African sources, and how are these transformations related to political conditions? What relation does current work bear to the colonial and vernacular African traditions, and how are its meaning and validity affected by these references in the context of apartheid?

The author addresses such questions by dealing with a wide range of work within a critical and historical framework. The work discussed includes projects in Soweto, Bophuthatswana, and Mitchells Plain (a “Coloured area” near Cape Town), as well as within “white areas.”

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Notes on contributors

Graham Owen

Graham Owen is an architectural practitioner and critic in Toronto. He studied architectural history at the Universities of Edinburgh and Toronto and architecture at Toronto, where he received the Goulstone Travelling Scholarship. He has been a visiting critic at the Universities of Toronto and Waterloo, the Carleton School of Architecture, and the AA in London. His critical articles have appeared in The Journal of Canadian Art History, The Fifth Column, Section a, and Impulse.