BACK TO SKOOL (WITS)

 

Back at architecture school, 18 years on. Wits (University of the Witwatersrand) was a grand neoclassical campus, cascading down a hillside. I was 39, almost twice the age of my classmates who were mostly rich young white kids. Or so I thought of them at the time.

South Africa was in transition. I found lodgings in a "grey area" where the Group Areas Act was not enforced. The place felt quite surreal to me, coming from nine years living in an independent black African country which at that time seemed to be a shining example

There was a computer room. I learned the basics of Autocad, but still the main use in practice was the formatting of text. Copy-paste and undo were such powerful tools to someone who had quite recently written university assignments out by hand.

I was still leaving spaces for the illustrations and drawing these directly in place, or pasting in photocopies with the slight reduction that made them look so much crisper. I had almost forgotten how important the "reduce" feature on photocopiers was to me. Something I haven't used for years, now that we scan drawings and do our layouts inside a software package.

 

 

I would prepare text leaving space for the drawings. Create these separately, several to an A4 sheet. Copy - Reduce to say 80%, cut the sheet up and paste the drawings in with cow gum, clean off the excess with a ball of dried up glue, maybe a bit off tippex here and there to disguise the edges. Then photocopy from this master original for a nice clean submission

 

 

When I got back from Joburg having completed fifth and sixth year architecture. I found myself jobless. I won't go into the story. I felt betrayed at the time, but it worked out for the best eventually.

I did two interviews and thought it over during the Xmas break. Opted to stay in Harare and work for Mike Clinton. This was one of my first projects, drawn with Autocad (for DOS) and taken through to completion. It's offices for a major supermarket chain, located in a light industry area, next to the warehouse. According to googlurth it's still there.

Image search brings up the nostalgia of the "side menu" interface. You had to click through three "pages" to draw a line, as I remember. Fortunately I picked up a "menu" file which I further customised. Right click on the mouse initiated the line command which was what you needed 90% of the time.

I did also use lots of keyboard shortcuts, and most of my layer names were one or two characters. Seems like a completely different universe. I did quite a lot of 3d massing, and came up with a pale grey screen which felt more like daylight to me.

You had to type in the full path name to open a file. The guys had files all over the place. I introduced two innovations. Substitute drives gave me J: for jobs, and K: for blocks (standard) This allowed menu files to work on machines where the paths were different, and /or quite long. The other breakthrough was XTree which looks really clunky now, but at the time made file management far more intuitive than the DOS command line 🙄

So many baby steps along the road from 1993 to 2023.

 

 

 

During my third and last year at the Bartlett school of architecture I saw myself as an arch rebel, although not in an aggressive way. I guess it was more of an inner rebellion. But I did abandon my career with no clear idea of where I was heading. Just a passionate belief that the world was changing.

During that year I interacted with two guest tutors who shared a flat together. Andy Mackillop was an early advocate of environmentalism, limits to growth, alternative technology etc. I sat in on a couple of his sessions, solar power, wind power, passive heating /cooling, composting toilets ... I soaked it all up avidly.

Yann Weymouth was an energetic young American architect who ran my last design project. It was for a creche building that could be dismantled and moved around, opened or closed according to the seasons.

Later on, Yann tried to persuade me not to abandon architecture. I went to their flat for dinner and we all consumed too much of this and that. Maybe I missed the last tube, or maybe they just wanted to see me home safely. Andy volunteered to take me back on Yann's motorbike. Long story short we had a minor spill. Just a few scratches, but I think they suddenly realised it could have gone badly. For my part it was all an adventure.

Fast forward 45 years and my daughter was living in St Petersburg Florida. We visited the Dali museum a couple of times before I realised that it was designed by Yann. I've tried to contact him online without success. Maybe he doesn't remember me.

Randomly intersecting lives... memories are made of this.