ZIMBABWE FIRST AND LAST

 

Some snapshots from 1981, August /September when I first arrived as a volunteer building teacher. Cultural symbols absorbed during my first couple of weeks acclimatisation when I was put up in a rented house in a rented house in a formerly white suburb of what was then still called Salisbury. Zimbabwe TV logo with drums beating in the background. Oil drums and the flag.

The skyline at Rusununguko secondary school on Blue Waters Farm, 2000 hectares of prime agricultural land bought with Dutch aid money for an Education With Production experiment. There's a radio mast on the hill, barely visible. The graffiti is by Kundai, a precocious young niece of the teacher who would become my wife.

Sister Janice was tied up with ZIMFEP, the organisation behind six new schools dotted around the country, pursuing this educational experiment. I was brought up fundamentalist protestant and by 1981 was basically Atheist, but was recruited by a Catholic organisation, CIIR, which later changed its name to Progressio 👀 and then fizzled out. I found this out while trying to make contact with the organisation to share experience.

The mixture of youths and teenagers clearing ground for a building became students of mine. They had been in the Bush in Mozambique during the war and one year into independence were trying to catch up on missed education. Great guys, but I was swamped by numbers.

 

This was one of the last projects I designed before I moved from Zimbabwe to Dubai. It's not very far from the first house we bought in Harare. I was looking on Google Earth for an image of that house and strayed across to look for the living units that were under construction when I left.

 

To my surprise the Nursery school was also there, just based on these concept sketches. It's a home for Aids Orphans. No idea how it has developed over the past 23 years.

This was put together very rapidly using Autocad and Photoshop (or similar) I was quite proud of it at the time, but put it out of my mind because it never went beyond early concept design.

 

The project was brought to us by Gardini and Sons a building company with strong connections to Clinton and Evans, who had done the work on Victoria Falls Hotel that I had been involved a few years earlier. They were always willing to work from basic drawings plus discussions on Site.

That's an excellent way to build if you have mutual trust.

 

 

 

 

OF TREES AND RAILINGS

 

More brick piers and railings on my street. The railings are modern replacements, not entirely out of tune with the period.

I don't know why I didn't spot this terracotta capping detail before, designed for a pier that is two and a half bricks square and therefore clearly recognisable as Flemish Bond. Mostly in a smooth red brick to match the terracotta. Looks like a pressed brick to me.

There is one pier that has contrasting detail in yellow brick. The walling between piers is mostly high enough to not need a railing with a saddle-back brick coping (half round) but there are lower examples with stone blocks intended as bases for railings.

This is a road with large, mostly detached, Victorian houses, all different in some way.

 

 

More stone copings with evidence of poured lead fixings for railings. I heard recently that these railings may never have made it into the smelters for the military effort.

Could be a rumour spread by bitter pacifist conservationists 👀🤔🤣 This example is just around the corner from my place. Unusual to see a very wide flat coping. Seems to have weathered OK. Must be well over a century old. (150?)

 

 

These are Black Walnuts, collected from War Memorial Park. Haven't tried to crack any open yet. Should be close to harvest time. The black is between the green and the shell. Turns your fingers yellow if you don't use gloves. Can be used to make ink.

I think there is only one tree in the park. Most of these had fallen to the ground. It's a separate species to English Walnut. Don't know much about the wood. It's not a very old tree, compared to many around the edge of the main field. I'm guessing that a gap opened up and someone in the parks department decided it would be an interesting species to plant.

 

 

Another North American tree in my local park. It's on a branch of the Magnolia family. Commonly known as the Tulip Tree because of the shape of the flowers. There are a few of these of different ages.

Now as we progress into autumn, the range of colours is truly splendid. Lots of yellow, still some green and a sprinkling of orange-brown. I believe the wood is quite good. This is one of the more mature specimens.

 

MEMORIES AND TRANSITIONS

 

This is Revit work from 2006. Designed by an architect in our Dubai office called Eva. She was used Autocad and Sketchup which was normal for concept design architects at GAJ, not just then, but for most of the time I was there (22 years)

I was trying to advocate for a full-on switch to Revit and would insert myself into projects towards the end of concept design showing how a similar standard of output could be achieved using Revit.

 

If the projects proceeded to Schematic design then we would be ahead of the curve, although at this stage neither the clients nor the other consultants showed much interest in the BIM idea.

This project went no further. Whether Eva and her partner ever made the transition to BIM, I couldn't say. They went back to Germany two or three years later and apart from the occasional nod on Social Media, I have lost touch.

 

 

Although it's just across the road from us, I didn't notice this terracotta capping until this morning. Suffering from neglect, aggressive hedge growth and cement pointing, the classical beauty of the egg and dart motif still shines through.

What was the original context. Not likely to be a gatepost, located right on the corner of a corner plot. I'm guessing it was a termination to iron railings running in both directions. These would have been cut down to feed the war foundaries, first or second.

I will make a point of looking for the sawn-off stubs set into a low boundary wall. These were pointed out to me as a young boy growing up in Barnsley when the second war was still fresh in adult minds. We played at killing Germans often enough with our toy guns.

 

 

Partly right and partly wrong. I thought I would find evidence of railings on low walls around the corner from the plot corner pillar of yesterday's post. Not so.

But I did find this on the next street down. I do believe that's lead, poured into a socket cut into a stone coping, once-upon-a-time securing an iron railing. Some of the stone is spalled away.