ZIMBABWE CALLING

 

End of the month. I have a new system where I keep all my current images in a root folder of my OneDrive cloud storage. When the month ends, I move them into a more deeply nested folder in a hierarchy that organises everything in a structured way.

So all the diary images are about three levels deep, in groups of several years at a time, then folders for individual years, then months. For the early part of my life there aren't many images, so I just have a folder for early years, one for primary, one for secondary. Even my university years are quite sparse.

While moving my August images from the more easily accessible root folder to the correct slot in the nested hierarchy, I inevitably go down the "let's clean things up a bit" rabbit hole. This morning that took me to 1998, a year of great optimism, before Zimbabwe started to implode.

Top left uses Autocad 3d tools and a semi-render DOS package called Autovision. This was the core of a 20 storey office block, my biggest project to date and under construction in 1998. I was planning the interior decor of the core.

Top right is a project for a house extension, using a pirated copy of Archicad, which offered a faster way to produce those semi-render images, but not yet a serious contender for construction drawing packages.

Then below we have a cluster housing project that was built in Harare. 2d Autocad in which I was highly fluent. Every view separately drawn and updated in case of changes, but still a quick way to knock out this kind of project. Site photo of the same project after completion.

 

 

1999 and the biggest project of my career as principal designer. This is in the very centre of Harare and was intended to read as one in a series of office blocks by Clinton and Evans on the same short stretch of Samora Machel Avenue. The black granite and flush glazing were trademark materials.

I wanted to give this one a Zimbabwean identity, hence the chevrons and different colours of glass. I wouldn't claim that it has great architectural merit, but it works and in some way catches the spirit of the time, when the early optimism of independence was beginning to fade.

I took this project from inception to completion, almost single handedly. Autocad (DOS version) was my main tool throughout. Some use of Photoshop and MS Word to compose these pages from the letting brochure which we created for the client as part of our standard service.

I was not an experienced architect when handed this project, having taken a 16 year detour via bricklaying and teaching: finally registering as an architect at the end of 1995. So I have mixed feelings about the design . But it's part of my story and I never aspired to be an "Architect's Architect"

However, I do wonder what might have been if Zimbabwe had not imploded and I had continued to lead projects from concept design onwards. I did that for my first two small projects in Dubai, then found myself in the "production" team. On the positive side I got to be the BIM guru for almost 20 years but that's another story.