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@JO NOERO Jo Noero is a South African architect who has worked in South Africa both during Apartheid and in post Apartheid years, completing over 200 buildings. He is a highly accomplished architect, with an earnest, and human way of approaching architecture. Emeritus Professor (UCT), Hon.FAIA, International Fellow RIBA, Hon. Dr. (Brighton – UK),Pr. Architect SA, SAIA, CIFA
When was your first conscious realisation that there is such a thing as architecture? Is there some kind of memory that you have of architecture that could be responsible for igniting a passion for the field? I am unfortunately one of those architects who did not have an epiphany about architecture. Let me explain – I matriculated and entered medical school – I had believed that I wanted to be a doctor from an early age – after a year of medical studies I realized it was not for me – the teaching method was no different from what I had been exposed to at school – I attended a high school in Durban which was based on a typical English public school – which meant that it was a nightmare with daily floggings and very poor teachers and I learnt literally nothing of value in four years of schooling - so learning from that experience I dropped out mid-way through my second year determined that I was not going to go through that same kind of experience again minus the floggings of course. I did various jobs and travelled around Brazil for a few years. I bumped into an old school friend after returning from Brazil who was in his final year of architecture studies and he invited me to an end of year party in the thesis studio – I was knocked out by what I saw and decided that this was what I wanted to study. I applied, was accepted with absolutely no design or art experience and became an architecture student – have enjoyed every minute since then. Thinking back I come from an Italian immigrant family and my parents and sister and myself travelled to Italy almost every year to visit family and friends and I remember my father taking me around the great cities of Europe so maybe this had something to do with my positive reaction to architecture. Who knows? Your former colleague, Pancho Guedes, boldly ‘claimed for architects the rights and liberties that painters and poets have held for so long’. What do you make of the idea of Architecture as an artform? I don’t believe that Pancho believed in these words – he saw them as a provocation more than anything else. In
my view architecture is an art form but is different from the other arts inasmuch as it is a practical art – namely it is brought into being in order to satisfy a purpose. This makes it different from the other fine arts such as sculpture in which the work is made with no purpose in mind other to create a work of art. It is true that as architects we are asked to act on the work we do as artists but at the same time we do the work on behalf of other people who have their own dreams and we are paid huge sums of money to do this work to satisfy the needs of others. It is this tension between the need to express oneself freely and the need to ensure that the needs of others are met sometimes even in ways which may contradict what we want to do – this tension lies at the heart of what makes architecture so interesting and vital. The cultural precinct in Port Elizabeth, Red Location, which you designed contains a digital library in which people from different economic and social standings are forced to meet. As you said in a Columbia lecture, “People brush shoulders with each other. Sometimes in ways they wouldn’t normally do or wouldn’t normally like but they have to do it.” Do you see it as the responsibility of the architect to steer the society politically or otherwise and why? South Africa is a different and special case when it comes to public architecture and the like – we are in a process of transforming our society from a racist unequal one to a non-racial constitutional democracy. The Freedom Charter, Bill of Rights and the Constitution are very clear in how one exercises one’s responsibilities as both a citizen and an architect. I believe that architects need to act in accordance with these wishes so we do have a political role and we are called upon in all the work that we do to exercise our judgement to act ethically and purposefully on behalf on both our clients as well as the citizens of our cities and country.
