10 minute read
Architecture must pivot around people
Architecture must pivot
AROUND PEOPLE
By Patrick McInerney and Christoph Malan, directors at Co-Arc International Architects
Architecture is fundamentally important to the human experience, as it frames the world in which we live. At its core, architecture is about people, about humanity and the human condition. As British prime minister Winston Churchill observed in 1944: “We shape our buildings and afterwards, our buildings shape us.”
It stands to reason, therefore, that we approach architecture with our humanity fully engaged.
Whereas countries such as the Netherlands can demonstrate exemplary models of well-integrated social housing development and management, the world is, unfortunately, also replete with failures, from Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis, Missouri to the Komtar Tower in Malaysia, Cabrini-Green in Chicago, Pink Houses in Brooklyn and the infamous Grenfell Tower in London.
South Africa has also failed to shine in this respect.
From the outset, the development of new South African housing policies in the 1990s buckled under the social pressure of demand, leading politicians to regard housing delivery as a purely statistical exercise. This approach has sidelined architectural and urban design professions. In spite of lip service being paid to social integration in the later “Breaking New Ground” housing policy, the settlements that continue to be developed across SA remain a sprawl of carelessly designed and built, anonymous, disconnected and sterile huts.
If the pressure to deliver housing by numbers was meant to prevent SA from spinning into revolution, some might argue that the country’s highly unequal society puts us on the verge of just such
(Top, from left): Patrick McInerney and Christoph Malan.
(Above): Grenfell Tower in London.
(Left): Four modern social housing units in terra colours containing modest family apartment houses in Ypenburg, The Hague, Netherlands.
a revolution today; one fuelled in part by the lack of respect afforded to many South Africans in the design, development and management of their living environments.
Image vs identity
When architecture loses its focus on humanity, and the particular social and physical context, the process becomes more about image than identity. This is highly problematic and a great deal of the commercial architecture around SA has certainly fallen foul of that search for image while neglecting the community, pedestrians and the liveability of the space.
A remarkable project from Urban-Think Tank, a global interdisciplinary design practice, shows us that architecture and humanity can effectively merge to create something truly special. The Empower Shack project found a home in Khayelitsha, Cape Town under the watchful eye of local architects Design Space Africa. The concept is simple: develop a new open-source housing prototype and urban plan which could be a model for informal settlement upgrading across SA. Using the existing footprint of the shack and working closely and transparently with residents and city planners, structures are built using local labour and materials according to architectural principles focused on creating homes, not just houses.
(Right): Komtar Tower in Malaysia.
Key obstructions
Empower Shack is an extraordinary and in-
novative way of working, and an approach SA should certainly replicate. But standing squarely in the way of a fully-formed, human-focused approach to architecture are several threats: • In our focus on the individual housing unit, we fail to design for communities on an urban scale. • Our obsession with security fragments society and results in areas like Fourways in Johannesburg, which has a dearth of urbanity and is exclusionary by nature.
A STRONG FOUNDATION FOR INFRASTRUCTURE SUCCESS
• Economic forces persistently trump the social and human factors in favour of treating buildings solely as assets to be draped in billboards and neglected when times get tough. • Political inconsistency undermines our ability to translate policies into long-term projects and to see these through to completion. Constant changes in focus within government inevitably alter the focus of the city and make it harder to deal with critical issues like restitution. • A disregard for natural environmental considerations and opportunities erodes the very foundations of sustainable settlement development. Areas such as
Johannesburg and Soweto could capitalise and preserve their watercourses as ecological footprints which could form the sort of urban planning green areas that make the likes of Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens and
New York’s Central Park such outstanding features.
Instead, developers have been allowed to build right up to river banks, in spite of possible ecological concerns.
There are other evolving considerations of which architects should also be aware, such as mankind’s growing technological addiction, which creates opportunities to re-think social congregation through interventions like free Wi-Fi coupled to public spaces. In Argentina, free Wi-Fi has resulted in city squares and parks filled with young people on their cellphones or interacting. It is impossible to ignore this new force shaping our society.
Listen and learn
While adaptation is critical, fundamental human needs continue to underpin the essence of good architecture – and that begins with a sense of belonging and community. This is
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(Above): New York’s Central Park.
(Left): Soweto Townships in Johannesburg.
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