Wolff architects by SpazioFMG per l'Architettura

together

visions from contemporary african architecture

wolff architects heinrich wolff

6 Inkwenkwezi Secondary School, Cape Town, South Africa, 2004 - 2006 10 Usasazo Secondary School, Cape Town, South Africa, 2000 - 2003 14 Vredenburg Hospital Vredenburg, South Africa, 2006 - ongoing 24 Workshop 17 Cape Town, South Africa, 2013 - 2014

Index

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Wolff Architects Heinrich Wolff

Wolff is a design studio concerned with developing an architectural practice of consequence through the mediums of design, advocacy, research and documentation. The Wolff team, made up of a group of highly skilled, committed and engaged individuals, is led by husband and wife couple Ilze & Heinrich Wolff. Prior to establishing Wolff with Ilze, Heinrich led Noero Wolff Architects, with Jo Noero from 1998 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2012, the firm responsible for numerous award winning projects such as the Red Location Museum of Struggle and the Inkwenkwezi and Usasazo secondary schools. In 2007 Heinrich won the prestigious Daimler

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Chrysler Award for Architecture, in 2010 he was the first South African architect to be invited to participate in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale and in 2011 he was elected as the Designer of the Future by the Wouter Mikmak Foundation. Ilze, co-founded OHA in 2007, a practice responsible for researching and documenting SA architecture through the popular Open House tours which she continues to direct parallel to Wolff. Ilze, an architect and scholar within the fields of heritage, architectural history and public culture, collaborated with Noero Wolff in 2007 to design House Wolff which received an SA National award of merit in 2010.

Inkwenkwezi Secondary School, Du Noon, Cape Town, South Africa 2004 - 2006

The Inkwenkwezi Secondary School was commissioned by the Western Cape. The school is on the periphery of the settlement next to a very big sport fields and on a dead end street. The Road to the North of the site is such a busy vehicular route that it makes pedestrian access from it undesirable for fear of children's safety. Access is from the quiet dead end road which allows children to linger safely. The school protects itself from theft and vandalism by creating an outer “wall" with all play spaces and access points beyond the safety of the entrance gates. The outer "wall" of classrooms encloses an undulating court with an open end facing Table Mountain. The location of the building on a sloping site, on the edge of the settlement, was exploited to develop a civic architecture that distinguishes itself from the residential fabric around it by its scale and sculptural form. The hall rises to a tall corner which is exaggerated by vertical fluting and has a characteristic window. The same motive is repeated in the library. The entrance façade is layered with the hall and the library/administration block forming syncopated profiles in a composite

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façade. The entrance to the school is along a ramp, through this façade. From the township another layering is read: the Junior Classrooms are lowered by a meter to make this block read against the block behind it and the hall at the back. This layered wall architecture with its undulating profiles form a recognisable image for the school. The name of the school (meaning morning star) is painted on this façade. Since the school brief is largely made up of repetitive classroom modules, the wall architecture is a devise to bind these modules together and set the stage for the large scale undulations in plan which breaks the monotony of the block forms and the corridors. The windows on the long horizontal facades were bound together by a decorative device that draws inspiration from the way people paint on public buildings, be it lines or signage, which over time re-articulates or de-articulates the architecture. The decorative pattern which also draws on African weave work has its constructional logic in the need for expansion joints between concrete beams and block work and between various panels of block work.

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Usasazo Secondary School, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa 2000 - 2003 This secondary school was commissioned by the Provincial Government and consists of 37 classrooms, a library, computer room, hall and an administration section. The brief was expanded by the architects to allow the school to be adapted to new Further Education and Training (FET) legislation which calls for more entrepreneurial training. The classrooms on the street edge are designed to be used for entrepreneurial teaching with hatches that open to the street to allow interaction with the public. These classrooms would be used for subjects like car and appliance repair, hair care and food trade. This single storey line of classrooms have a fragmented articulation that mimics the scale of the informal settlement around it, whilst also declaring its institutional character by the giant order of this wall of classrooms. In an area like Khayelitsha, the schools are often the first public buildings and for a long time the only permanent, durable and expensive buildings. The schools therefore have a critical role in the formation of good quality urban environments. The design of the Usasazo school attempts to perpetuate and formalise the street character of this area in Khayelitsha. The street facade of the school has a strong image that can always be

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associated with the school. The undulating central circulation space is similar in character to the organic urban spaces created in informal settlements. This space is filled with trees and benches to receive its many users. The canopies on the perimeter of this space are designed to facilitate circulation on the scale of an individual and of a crowd. From this space one enters the various functional blocks of the school. The double volume of the library with its U-shaped wall of books becomes a celebration of academic study. The site for the school is in a densely populated informal settlement. There is an incredible need for land which makes all space very valuable. Therefore the school occupies the smallest possible area and leaves the remaining land for a communal sport field and productive agricultural use. The L-shaped forms of the classroom blocks protect the open spaces from the strong directional winds and wind driven sand. The section of the buildings are designed to minimise the amount of openings on the windward side of the building that are exposed to the corrosive wind. The roof lights are shaped to cause suction on the leeward side of the roof and to improve natural ventilation in summer when the warmer South-easterly wind blows.

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Vredenburg Hospital Vredenburg, South Africa, 2006 - ongoing

These 10 units provide on-site accommodation for doctors and nurses of the Vredenburg hospital. To create a domestic and private environment, the staff residence has its main spaces separated from the activities of the hospital. This is achieved by a large stair which creates a threshold to the central space and manipulating the view from the central space to face the valley without any view of the hospital. The steep mono-pitched roofs are aligned perpendicular to the dominant South-easterly and Northwesterly winds to create a space protected from these strong winds. The stepped platforms necessitated by the topography become useful in creating sub-spaces to the central exterior space. The terraces together with the low walls enclosing the stoeps and the pergolas assign potions of the main space to each unit. These devices are necessary to give the right level of privacy to each unit. Manipulation of the topography is therefore the primary device in establishing the character of the place.

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Section through kitchen

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Section through wards

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Workshop 17 Cape Town, South Africa 2013 - 2014

The brief The University of Cape Town approached the architects to design a new Innovation Hub for the Graduate School of Business (GSB) in a portion of an old industrial shed, called Workshop 17, in the V&A Waterfront. The Innovation Hub aims to stimulate small business development through business incubation; a process whereby the development of a product or service occurs in a professionally guided environment to ensure that all aspects of a new business are equally developed. Business incubation has proven to contribute significantly to the success and longevity of new businesses. In order to develop shared ideas with the client, the architects wrote a book called Situations for Creativity. This book is an animated and illustrated â&#x20AC;&#x153;Metric Handbookâ&#x20AC;? that considers what the character of space should be like in order to stimulate creativity, for both an individual and a group. The book ended with a fantastical section illustrating a place with intense social interaction and hinted at a disregard for the prescribed constraints (we were told not to go above the roof, below ground our out onto the adjacent dry dock).

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Interrogating the brief The brief called for a coffee shop to establish interaction with the public outside. This requirement would certainly not resolve the larger order problems. The diversity and intensity of human interaction had to be improved to have a satisfactory location for a university building focused on economic development. To achieve this goal a strategy of collective interest was developed; first we created a great urban street, then we found the entities (existing in the V&A or new) that would benefit from participating in it. In essence we propose an urban order that would be more significant than any of the entities along it (including the GSB). The individual businesses can come and go but the urban order should be durable. The proposal was to take over the whole shed, remove the two short end facades and make a street right through the middle of the building. The ground floor can be given over to a commercial activity while the university building can establish itself along this busy street. Additional buildings were proposed along the street that will be lettable and could also be used in future for the expansion of the GSB activities.

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Urban strategy

The building

South African cities are becoming increasingly segregated and compartmentalised. We must make cities that work better for its citizens. The architects of this project believe that every architectural project should be used to make a better city for all. In the case of this project, the V&A and the GSB were asked to consider that the urban corollary of a market economy, as opposed to a â&#x20AC;&#x153;mall economyâ&#x20AC;?, would require not only conglomeration of urban actors, but also a spatial structure that can grow and that allows others to participate in it. The new street that is made through Workshop 17 makes a vital urban connection between the main active area around the shopping center precinct and the Clock Tower precinct on the one side; and the aquarium, the bus stop, the GSB campus and new BRT stops on the other. The Depth Map studies indicate in red the areas of intense interaction and connectivity therefore also likely to be the most successful urban spaces. Because the new street and the adjoining spaces all belong to the V&A it presented the opportunity to make the new Innovation Hub fly over the street. This meant that the activity of the street could be complemented by the activity of the Innovation Hub, running perpendicularly overhead. This substantially increases the diversity and intensity of human interaction in the street.

The Innovation Hub is a suspended structure that makes a 50m x 50m gridded steel slab over the market. It is proposed that the stalls in the market gets packed up every night to allow for other activities such as car displays, fashion shows, farmers markets, art exhibitions or even churches to operate under it. Each of the coffers in the grid has adjustable illumination which assists in the space inviting diverse activity. An indoor event space and a space for temporary events outside the shed add further diversity to the use of the activity of the street. Two spaces, perpendicular to the street on ground floor, are intended to establish a non-commercial urbanity. These spaces run right across the width of the plan. On the one side of the street there is generous tiered seating along a stair leading to a lookout point and on the other side there is a garden which can be used as a spillover from the event space as well as a place for bicycles and benches.

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Situations for creativity The Innovation Hub is given a relationship with a street as a campus would, but that is where the reference to traditional university buildings ends. The Innovation Hub is a series of floor plates with glass walls. Because of the dematerialised nature of the building, the strongest image of the building is not a facade but rather a ceiling; the big hovering plane that allows the richness of

urban activity under it. In order to stimulate creativity in an institution like this one, individuals require a personal workspace where they can concentrate, with some degree of separation from other individuals, but also with opportunity to see what others are doing. Most importantly, is a space which allows for the opportunity to socialise with others. To achieve this, the sections were developed where every individual has a stimulating personal work environment; some looking out at views (more private) and others looking over/up to other work spaces (more social). The tiered section is fundamental to achieving connectivity and distance. The views down to the market sets a context for the economic domain that the studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; work is about to enter into. A large social space is at the center of the building over the street. This space contains informal meeting spaces, publicly accessible exhibition space and a canteen with tables and seating where tea breaks and meals can happen. The entrance and the toilets are located in such a way that everyone is forced to go through the social space. Social interaction between people in the Innovation Hub is central to the exchange of ideas and making business contacts. The expression of socialisation and visual interconnections in the building become the institutional representation of the Innovation Hub. Technical requirements of the street The idea of creating a street is also

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a technically expedient solution. It allows for a substantially simplified fire design which in turn allows for a lighter structure. A series of blocks are inserted into the plan to contain the fire escapes, toilets, tea kitchens and mechanical and electrical service spaces.

Plan of the ground floor

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Cross section 1

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Cross section 2

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Inkwenkwezi Secondary School

Vredenburg Hospital

Architects: Noero Wolff Architects in association with Sonja Spamer Location: Du Noon, Cape Town Year: 2004 - 2006 Dimensions: 2500m² Functions: School - classrooms, hall, library, offices and sports field Project leader(s) Heinrich Wolff Collaborator(s) Bulelani Ketsekile, Nadia Tromp, Robert McGiven, Sonja Spamer

Architects: Wolff Architects and Noero Wolff Architects Location: Vredenburg, Cape Town Year: 2006 - ongoing Dimensions: 8000m² Functions: Hospital, Theatres, Wards, support services, staff accommodation Project leader(s) Heinrich Wolff Collaborator(s) Ricardo Sa, Uno Pereira, Maria Wolff, Radinka van der Walt, Yusuf Vahed, Anastasia Messaris, Simon Birch, Mias de Vries, Adam Clemens, Nomonde Gwebu, Vivien Loseby, Ant Vervoort, Bayo Windapo, Lawden Holmes

Usasazo Secondary School Architects: Noero Wolff Architects Location: Khayelitsha, Cape Town Year: 2000 - 2003 Dimensions: 2500m² Functions: classrooms, hall, library, offices and sports field Project leader(s) Heinrich Wolff Collaborator(s): Sushma Patel, Robert McGiven, Bulelani Ketsekile

Credits

Workshop 17 Architects: Wolff Architects Location: V & A Waterfront, Cape Town Year: 2013 - 2014 Dimensions: 6000m² Functions; Business school innovation centre, Market, rentable offices, event space

Credits