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.

You have said that the street is the only truly public space remaining. In an urban context how should one go about designing the street in this case?

This comment I made specifically with regard to South Africa. I am tired of architects/urban designers/planners going on about the need for open public space in our cities. We need to remake space in our cities to accommodate many more people than have lived there in the past so open public space is a scarce resource and needs to be wisely used. In my experience of cities in SA the only spaces that people use freely, creatively and imaginatively are the streets, their edges and the small spaces adjacent to the streets. So it seems quite clear to me that we need to focus on the street as the primary public space of our cities and not parks, cycle tracks, wild life preserves and so on. Cities are places where all kinds of exchange happens- where business is conducted and they importantly give shape and coherence to the order of our cities.

Image 1: Making a settlement where two roads cross.

Funk music is often seen as an upbeat, vibrant genre of music that lifts the spirits and is fun. Architecture can sometimes be seen as something that contrastingly is inflicted upon people and is a very serious field. How do you see Architecture and its role in the happiness of people?

Architecture should make people happy – very difficult to achieve – Salvador Dali once wrote that the true test of a good work of art is that when you see it you want to eat it. I believe that the test of good architecture is that when you experience it you want to smile. This does not happen a lot – too many architects are too serious – their work is not joyous and certainly does not not bring a smile to ones face – one simply has to look at the work of architects such as Peter Zumthor to understand what I mean – unbelievably their work is lauded almost everywhere and is considered special - God forbid that I have to live in a world populated with dreary buildings so serious in intent that they offer no possibility of joy.

Funk music has a lot of its roots based in a socio-political climate of segregation. The ramifications of South Africa’s apartheid are still visible in its urban structure today. How does one go about handling such an issue as an architect?

We have a huge amount of work to undo the spatial legacy of apartheid. It will take generations to fix and what makes it even more difficult is that the fixing has got to be done without radically changing the shape and form of our cities. We need to re –imagine our cities not as unipolar cities but multi-nucleated cities tied together with efficient transport networks. This will require a leap of imagination not yet evident.

An archaic definition of ‘Funk’ is as a noun, meaning a coward. In what ways are architects cowardly today?

I do think architects are cowardly – I don’t see too many architects taking on the kind of people who employ them. By this I mean we have architects like OMA for example who talk a good talk about society but who work for example for the Chinese Broadcasting Corporation. I would have thought that an example could have been made by standing up to the clients who represent values of censorship and state control. So yes, this attitude does cascade downwards and most architects are cowardly who do the bidding of their sponsors/clients even when they know that the values represented by these institutions are not kosher.

As a South African myself, I wonder, how should the architect of the post-colonising country such as the Netherlands respond to the sensitivities of a past that is often ignored?

I have always been interested in the Netherlands because of its close ties to our country. I recently read a book about the early proponents of apartheid and was interested to learn that Hendriek Verwoerd who was the architect of apartheid was both Dutch but more importantly was influenced in his racist ideology by a set of Dutch intellectuals who lived in Holland in the 40`s. Similarly the Dutch people turned over proportionately more Jews to the Nazis than any other European country – so my view is that Holland needs to reflect upon its history and to not worry about helping to decolonize the former colonies. Maybe you need to reflect upon and get to grips with your own not so glorious past.

You seem quite at peace with the idea that people will adapt your buildings and make use of them how they see fit. How should one go about designing spaces that let people use them? And how does one know when it is appropriate to bend laws in favour of the people that will be using the spaces?

First of all – we make buildings for people to use – also the buildings are paid for and owned by people other than the architect so how can we claim any kind of ownership over what is done to the buildings by the owners and occupants when the architect has completed his/her work. Rather I would like to reframe the issue by asking how is it possible for architects to design their buildings to offer up to people the freedom to use/occupy the spaces in whatever ways they see

fit so that the architecture retains its integrity as a work of architecture. This very rarely enters our design way of thinking which means that most of our buildings are not sufficiently robust - when they are adjusted by the users the spaces lose their coherence and are sometimes rendered useless and even redundant. Regarding the law – I am happy to use whatever means is open to me to enrich the possibilities that architecture might open up to the people who use the spaces that we make. Most regulations which govern what can and cannot be done with buildings are restrictive and inhibit creativity and usefulness. In SA the vast majority of homes are built by people who build for themselves on land which they don’t own - we refer to these kinds of settlements as shack settlements or informal housing – the thing that is interesting about these settlements is that they provide a modicum of shelter – are built at no cost to the state and use recycled materials very effectively – what this suggests to me is that when left to their own devices people are more than capable of housing themselves – this is not a call for the state to remove itself from the responsibility of providing housing as a form of income redistribution. Rather that the state should leave people to take care of those things that they can do for themselves and that the state should limit its actions to those areas where people cannot help themselves for example in the provision of bulk services and utilities and the provisions of school, clinics/hospitals and other public buildings.

Image 2 & 3: Freedom to build: Table House in Philippi (Left); Table House project at a neighbourhood scale in Philippi (Right)

You’ve mentioned weak and strong geometries. What exactly would you mean by this, and why do you advocate for strong geometries?

Strong geometries are those that are made employing the discipline of orthogonal geometries and platonic solids. Conversely weak geometries do not employ these geometries. So where does this idea come from? For a long time my practice has been concerned with the issue of adaptability – how does one design space that can both accommodate a purpose required by a commissioning body and also at the same time open itself up to a variety of different uses over time? This matter is particularly acute in the world today in which rapid technological change happens so quickly that sometimes the buildings that we are commissioned to do are redundant even before they are finished. In this regard the writings of Aldo Rossi are important particularly in the book THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE CITY. Rossi explains that as a result of the research he had done on the form of the traditional European city those building that offered themselves up to different uses over time were those buildings that were marked by an extreme precision of geometric form. This is amply demonstrated by church buildings which are brought into use as religious symbolic space and which over time have been able to accommodate all kinds of different uses. And it is clear that the geometry of churches in most societies is marked by an extreme precision of geometric form. So this has been a preoccupation of my practice for the last ten years or so and we have been making a number of buildings which have attempted to address the issue of change and adaptability through the use of strong geometries.

Image 4: Adaptability and Change in use, House Nxumalo - Alexandra Township

Architecture is in your words came into being to satisfy a purpose. You have said that Architecture’s ethical dimension lies in the satisfaction of this purpose. Could you elaborate on this?

Architecture is a practical art and as such is borne into being in order to satisfy purpose – without purpose one cannot have architecture – it is in the satisfaction of purpose that the ethical dimension of architecture resides. Buildings cannot be ethical – they are a collection of building materials assembled in particular ways to enclose space – it is only through human agency and use that buildings assume symbolic and cultural value – in a single moment that value can be turned on its head in response for example to a revolutionary moment – for example a church can become a torture chamber through a civil war. So where does the idea of ethics reside? I believe that ethics resides in the transactional relationship established between the client or commissioning body and the architect. It is at that moment when the architect accepts a commission that an ethical judgement is made. If one is asked to design a building which whilst satisfying the clients need is harmful to society at large then the architect can be said to have acted unethically – it is as simple as that. //