C&E BROCHURE

It should have been soul destroying but I took it as a challenge to keep experimenting and improving. We were just doing concept design after concept design while Zimbabwe's economy declined in the early 2000s. Hoping that one of them would go somewhere.

Sometimes I would do 3d faces in Autocad for the building masses, simple linework for the site and parking, then import this into Sketchup to generate views. We had given up on A1 sheets for concept work. Much more agile and effective to laser print A3 or A4 booklets.

Iteration is easier. Colour is baked in. You give the client a dozen copies to pass around the boardroom table. Seems obvious now, but it involved quite a mind shift at the time

The OK bazaars corporate brand was from an earlier era, before my time for the most part. These would all have been designed and drawn by hand. The intention behind this brochure was to project an image of gravitas. A practice with the history and capability to take on major projects in the region.

Could it have worked? Maybe. Ultimately it was overtaken by events. But I enjoyed putting it together and it's a privilege to share it with a wider audience a couple of decades later.

 

Sequential days in Dubai. Once or twice a year we get enough rain to cause considerable chaos here. Because it's such a rare event it doesn't really justify the cost of putting in underground storm water systems. And as you can see, 24 hours later the waters are receding. By the end of the week we will have forgotten all about it.

It started me wondering about how a storm water network would have worked anyway. In most countries the piped network would eventually connect to rivers, nature's own storm water system.

But what rivers? We don't have any. And to get the pipes under the roads plus with sufficient fall... You might end up with a pumping station to get it to outflow into the sea. That implies a large storage capacity to handle a flash flood without backing up the system, negating the rationale for the investment in the first place.

I'm no expert and I'm just thinking aloud, but it's interesting.

 

 

I always admired the multi-storey apartment blocks, in red facebrick by C&E in the Avenues area of Harare. They are very diverse in form, but immediately recognisable as belonging to the same sequence.

What is style? You can list commonalities but that doesn't capture the visceral connection. We recognise connections instinctively and almost instantly. It's a bit like handwriting, or guitar playing, timbre of someone's voice.

I didn't check out these blocks during my recent visit. I wonder what condition they are in? For that matter I have never been inside any of the apartments.

In the early two thousands we were doing small gated communities in a throwback style. Tin roofs and broad verandahs, a hint of Victoriana in the architectural metalwork. At first I resisted this deliberate attempt to evoke a "style from the past".

But Modernism itself is now a hundred years old and everything we do is built upon reworking a rich cultural inheritance.

Style is such a strange elusive quality. "You know it when you see it."

 

d

 

One of the books I was able to rescue from my house in Zimbabwe was a rather splendid landscape format hardback with watercolour sketches by Alex Jack. I don't remember how I acquired this. Was it still available new or did I pick it up second hand?

The drawings are charming and the text contains some interesting historical information of the "who did what when" variety.

The Bulawayo club was designed in1934 by Robertson and Whiteside in association with MacGillivray and Son. 1939 extensions by Robertson & MacGillivray included a private dining room.

 

My photos are from 2002. I was picked up and questioned by the police just after taking these. Photographing historic buildings can be a hazardous hobby. I managed to get away with deleting just a couple of pics. It was early days of digital so they weren't very clued in.