The ‘Silent’ Closure of Urban Public Space in Cape Town: 1975 to 2004

This study seeks to show that the closure of urban public space by residents in a South African context is not a recent phenomenon and that successful citizen-driven urban public space closures have been a feature of the urban landscape before the rise of gated communities and monitored urban public space. The primary objective of the study was to analyse and investigate spatio-temporal tendencies relating to the citizen-driven privatisation of urban public space in Cape Town. This objective would be driven by the creation of a comprehensive database of provincially gazetted urban land closures dating from 7 February 1975 to 17 December 2004 within one of the six municipal substructure regions of Cape Town. The secondary objective, but by no means less important, is an identification and analysis of the reasons forwarded, practices employed and techniques utilised by individual citizen-driven applications in two distinctly diverse residential suburbs within the study area.

DRAWING THE LINE BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND NATURE IN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY: Blade Runner's Critique of the Intention of the ‘Primitive Hut’

This essay examines our struggle with the technology of architecture by considering the conceptions of the ‘primitive hut’ put forward by Vitruvius, Marc-Antoine Laugier, Gottfried Semper, and Joseph Rykwert. In claiming the ‘natural origins’ of architecture, the notion of the ‘primitive hut’ has paradoxically supported the intention of architecture to cut itself free of nature and the earth. Architecture has, in this way, held open the possibility that it might overcome the limitations that frustrate its attempts to accommodate. In the film Blade Runner, both the depiction of a futuristic urbanism in a state of decay and the expression of an ambiguous relation between the built and the natural provoke a reassessment of the architectural ‘blade’ that desires the separation between nature and technology. Both Rem Koolhaas' discussion of the skyscraper and Piranesi's etchings depicting classical scenes will be viewed as similar critiques of this dichotomy. By framing the examination within K. Michael Hays' critique of the extreme positions of determinism and autonomy in architectural theory, the paper concludes that criticism has a responsibility to mediate these extremes by expressing the nature of the technological/architectural struggle.     

RE-READING SINGAPORE’S “BLACK AND WHITE” ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE: THE AESTHETIC AFFECTS AND AFFECTATIONS OF ADAPTIVE REUSE

Colonial-period military estates in Singapore are being gentrified for adaptive reuse producing high-end hospitality and retail venues for expatriate and tourist consumption. These include the feted “Black and White” residential enclaves synonymous with Singapore’s tropical aesthetic. But underlying this reinvention is a disturbing history of wartime repurposing under the Japanese Imperial Army, which temporarily destabilised the meanings and representations of these buildings. The seemingly undisturbed architectural typologies of barracks, bungalows and timber huts were backdrops to war, military occupation and captivity. This paper explores how the aesthetic affects and affectations that accompany adaptive reuse may conceal or disclose unsettling histories. It contrasts contemporary celebration of these revitalised historical neighbourhoods with their very different representation by wartime captives.     

‘TO BEG A TREE AND TARRY HIS PLEASURE TO ASSIGN IT TO ME’ — THE ROLES OF LORDS,LANDLORDS AND TENANTS IN HOUSE BUILDING AND IMPROVEMENT

David Clark in Vernacular Architecture vol. 44 drew together thoughts from papers at the Vernacular Architecture Group Winter conference in January 2013 and suggested what might be the standard model of the medieval house, its use and meaning.¹ As a premise it was proposed that customary tenants, the successors of the unfree villeins of the earlier medieval period, holding a single virgate of land, usually built their own house, albeit with the lord possibly supplying materials. This paper examines whether there is evidence that this was usually the case, and considers the availability or otherwise of building materials and the complex relationship between landlords and their tenants, leasehold, as well as customary, when new building or repair was required.

This article should to be read alongside C. R. J. Currie, “Why Historians Believe that Customary Tenants Normally Paid for Their Own Buildings: A Reply to Pamela Slocombe,” Vernacular Architecture 49 (2018): 38–43.     

South African ‘know-how’ and Israeli ‘facts of life’: the planning of Afridar,Ashkelon, 1949–1956

In 1949, in the newly founded state of Israel, South African architects Norman Hanson and Roy Kantorowich planned the city of Ashkelon and, within it, the exclusive neighbourhood unit Afridar. Managed by the South African Jewish Appeal, which initiated and funded the project, Afridar presented a radical exception to Israel’s centralized planning approach during that period. An early example of a semi-private settlement initiative for an ethnic and class-based enclave reserved for ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Jewish immigrants, it functioned as a ‘model town’ for the immigrant population from the Middle East and North Africa, which was housed by the government in the rest of the city of Ashkelon. Afridar’s enclave reproduced planning practices from South Africa, which had been coloured by race since the 1920s. Despite its exclusive image, it was modelled after progressive experiments in the design of Native Townships. Their main objective of such experiments was to improve the standards of housing of racially discriminated populations yet, in practice, they served as a tool to implement apartheid policies. This paper interrogates this ambivalence of social aspirations and complicity with state segregation practices through examining the translation of apartheid’s planning practices to the Israeli context, and the negotiations and conflicts this translation entailed.     

THE ARCHITECTURAL NARRATIVE: On Michael Speaks' Ruminations on a ‘Big,Soft, Orange’

The Big, Soft, Orange exhibition on four Dutch architectural firms focuses on the (soft) processes these architects have evolved for dealing with the large scope(big) of contemporary architectural undertakings and the particular historical and geographical conditions these attempts address in the contemporary Netherlands (orange). Following the precedent of the curator. Michael Speaks' comments, the content of the exhibition will be seen to have broader relevance for Architecture. Speaks' own circumstance is considerably influenced by his relationship with, and critique of the work of, Frederic Jameson. By reading between Jameson and Speaks, this paper will use Speaks' exhibition to question the success of the architecture of postmodernity's preoccupation with overtuming the modern-modernism's Utopian assertions, its preoccupation with form, its totalising tendency, and the strictures of the ‘handed-down’ discipline of architecture with a telos in Building.From a Heideggerian perspective the paper will consider the architectural process as the concrete materialisation of the narrative of architectural production informs other than, but leading toward, the traditionally privileged architectural form: Building. Rather than the architectural approaches of postmodernity overturning modernism,it will be concluded that these approaches are merely innovative differentiation as they ‘flesh-out’ and articulate hitherto unformed narratives already extant within the reductive frames of modernity     

‘Uneasy bedfellows’ conceiving urban megastructures: precarious public–private partnerships in post-war British New Towns

ABSTRACT

From its inception, the European welfare state was a contract between the state, civic society, and the private sector. And yet, studies on the architecture and urbanism of the European welfare state frequently overlook the role played by the private sector, as the emphasis is commonly placed on governmental action. However, apart from governments also private actors played an important role in shaping the post-war welfare state. New towns in particular were sites of experiment. Here, public–private partnerships forged novel collective spaces, which challenged and redefined what constituted the civic realm. This paper focuses on one such novel type of collective space: the megastructural ‘heart’ of second-wave British New Towns. Combining mass consumption with administrative and civic functions, thereby blending the concepts of ‘shopping centre’ and ‘city centre’, these structures embodied the welfare state’s belief that capitalism could neither live with nor without the existence of a pervasive welfare system (and vice versa). Through the analysis of three megastructures, this paper highlights the important role that private actors played in the formation of the post-war British welfare state; it explicates the lofty societal ambitions that these New Town schemes expressed; and it pinpoints the precariousness of public–private partnerships in the development of urban megastructures.     

The tribulations of Walter Burley Griffin’s final Australian plan: Milleara as ‘the garden city of the future’ 1925–1965

ABSTRACT

The Chicago architect/planner Walter Burley Griffin (1876–1937) is known world-wide for his plan for Canberra, Australia’s national capital. Working with his life and professional partner Marion Mahony, he was also responsible for a series of suburban and smaller town schemes in the US and Australia from 1913 until the late 1920s. Most of his Australian designs were embedded in larger processes of speculative land development. The Milleara Estate, commissioned by the little-known developer Henry Scott in 1925, was laid out and available for sale across what are now known as the Melbourne suburbs of Keilor East and Avondale Heights in early 1927 well in advance of the true wave of development of that suburban region. This paper traces the initial impetus for the estate as a ‘garden city’ and its execution and sale with use of the Griffin name and ethos. While Griffin’s association faded during a period of stagnation, it was evoked nearly thirty years later to contest a government plan to completely re-design the estate.     

‘A Laboratory of Heating and Ventilation’: the Johns Hopkins Hospital as experimental architecture, 1870–90

This article offers a fresh look at the origins and environmental design of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, between c. 1875 and 1890. It augments existing histories through close reference to the hospital archives and by contextualising the building within the career and interests of John Shaw Billings, a doctor who was retained by the Hospital Trustees as an expert adviser on hospital design and management. The episode is presented as one of architectural ‘experiment’, in which an hypothesis was formulated, constructed and monitored in use. Architecture emerges from this analysis as an act of exploration and position-taking, with the hospital conceived as a ‘tool’ for didactic demonstration in an on-going multi-disciplinary, international discourse concerning the ventilation of non-domestic buildings.     

Building a Golden Grove ‘community’: a study of suburban production processes in South Australia, 1970s–1980s

Ideals of community have been associated with the practice of planning for over a century. Proponents of the Golden Grove Development considered particular ideals of community to be fundamental to the financial and social success of the new suburban development. This paper will analyse the early planning processes that underpinned the production of community ideals and argue that these planning processes took place at the transition between welfarism and neo‐liberalism. This study will offer provocative glimpses into late twentieth century suburban planning practices; practices that establish the Golden Grove Development as a model of late twentieth century suburban production processes.     

Not Doing/Overdoing: ‘Omission’ and ‘Excess’ – Lacaton & Vassal's Place Léon Aucoc,Bordeaux, and Construire's Le Channel,Scène Nationale de Calais,Calais

Is there any allegiance between the formal and the transgressive? Here architectural author and educator Robin Wilson explores two French projects by Lacaton & Vassal and Construire: the former being as pared back as the latter is exuberant. He investigates how despite the great variance in their aesthetic impact, they share ‘transgressive positions and a questioning approach to architectural production’.     

‘Must our cities remain ugly?’ – America's urban crisis and the European city: transatlantic perspectives on urban development, 1945–1970

This article explores the changing modes and mechanisms of the transatlantic dialogue between urban planners from the perspective of US urbanists. During the early post-war period, this dialogue intensified quickly. US planners were involved in their country's broad efforts to provide assistance to and build strong political ties with Western European nations. Accordingly, they assumed the role of tutors vis-à-vis their European peers. Due to urban America's apparent flaws and the success of European planning projects, however, their interest in Europe broadened considerably during the 1950s. Initially, the initiative of individuals remained crucial for the flow of planning information from Europe to the USA, and European immigrants and émigrés helped facilitate transatlantic transfers. Looking at Europe, American planners sought to address the shortcomings of the domestic practice of planning as they perceived them. Europe served as an argumentative tool for US experts who were eager to change the socio-political framework that limited their impact on urban development in their home country. Information about European planning was transmitted through a diverse set of channels and the biographies of many of the experts involved with transatlantic exchange remind us of the complex international planning networks that existed throughout the twentieth century. American planners' interest in Europe remained biased towards specific regions and topics. Nevertheless, US planners negotiated the way in which they brought their limited influence to bear on American urban environments in a transnational context. The framework that supported their integration into international planning discussions became increasingly institutionalized towards the end of the research period.