EXTERNAL‘S REFLECTIONS

0.1 VICTOR MOKABA

The second year Bachelor of Architecture programme has been a memorable experience for me as an external examiner. During many of the examination sessions, I often mentioned to my colleagues that I constantly needed to remind myself that I am examining secondyear students because their level of engagement was immensely mature and the students were confident of what they had pinned up and what they had designed. I believe that a large part of this was because of the guidance that they receive from their lecturers. In many of his podcasts, Robin Sharma notes that “teacher learns most” and in the case of the second-year group at the University of Johannesburg, I completely agree. I have learnt a lot and I am inspired by the freedom and confidence that the students have in expressing themselves. The students delved into the theme of queer space and queer history with Newtown as the context for their design explorations.

The group work components in the projects offered students the opportunity to learn about working with others to achieve the same goal. It was also an opportunity for students to use, share and develop their strengths and also enjoy collaboration and learning from others. Architecture and design in general is an iterative process, and the models which the students had built reinforced this idea. The models which were built were almost always one of the important tools that students used to represent their ideas and their explorations in the design process. Students had built provocative models which conveyed their thoughts and ideas.

The graphic representation in its entirety conveyed construction, design and the exploration of various methods of representing the design process and the subsequent outcomes. The student’s projects were at varying levels of completion and exploration. The projects which engaged and explored the briefs the most were able to immerse the viewer in their design ideas and attempts. Their work exhibited a strong sense of exploring spatial use in its varying scales ranging from the greater context to the more detailed intimate experiences. The exploration developed further through the technical resolution presented in their construction drawings which seamlessly integrated design and construction in the graphic representation of the final design. The projects which explored less showed a thin engagement with the content and the briefs and a disconnected process of design which often lead to an incomplete final design which just needed consistent design critique to push ideas in the right direction.

This second-year programme explores queer space. The development of social media has managed to connect people and also lead us to embrace and use social media platforms and other electronic means of communication to share ideas. Identity and gender have become topics which are constantly being discussed and debated. The course has successfully managed to allow students to meaningfully engage which the question of queer space, identity and gender. Architecture provides a platform for living and shapes our everyday experiences. These experiences of life often take place in spaces designed by people who were influenced in some way or another by their own life experiences and knowledge gained from those experiences. I believe that the project briefs have allowed the students to learn and display their learning through design. Well done to the students and a job well done by their teachers who have taught and guided them.

The second-year Bachelor of Architecture programme in the University of Johannesburg’s Department of Architecture is an excellent example of a collaborative approach to architecture teaching. Drawing on a theme driven by the design studio, the other primary modules in the year all integrate their briefs and approaches into elements of the theme. This bolsters the student experience through an exploration taken through multiple lenses. In 2022 the programme examined the notion of the ‘Public Closet,’ a spatial device that extends the previous year’s foray into queer space by examining the public, political, and social dynamics inherent in queerness, and the extremely personal experience students bring to the theme.

This year, the question of queer space was left more open to programmatic exploration by the students. Newtown, Johannesburg was selected as a fitting site in which to examine this theme due to its various layers of queer history. Students grappled with the architectural impetus behind the core brief with varying levels of success. The most ambitious projects ran with the notion of queer space and produced architectural responses that challenged the uniformity, or status quo, of Newtown. In doing so, the very presence of the buildings served to queer this part of the city and rewire the urban experience for many of its users. Less successful projects demonstrated a tentative engagement with the theme and programmatic requirements of queerness, opting in many cases to bypass the inherent political positioning of the brief. Their responses tended to seek closer alignment with the context and exhibited less confidence to challenge or speculatively reimagine their site.

I am a strong proponent of the political agency implicit in this brief and its open engagement with identity and gender. These are themes that are extremely important in society but often avoided in the classroom. Not only does an integrated approach to these themes equip students with a diverse analytical toolkit for approaching tough subjects, but extends their education beyond the walls of the architecture studio and into other complementary fields such as sociology, politics, and anthropology. Second year is the right moment for students to build on their first-year foundations with greater engagements with social issues, and ready them for more complex architectural briefs in third year. Congratulations to the teaching team for another year of insightful briefs and thematic bravery.