GREY AREAS

 Brixton. Not the London one, this is in Joburg. I used to have a friend there, and it was walking distance from my room in Vrededorp.

For some reason I went looking around on street view and remembering what the neighbourhood is like. I saved a bunch of snapshots and then decided to do rapid sketch overs.

It's not a deep study. Just trying to get a feel and resurface my memories to a level where they can mingle with other experiences of "the way we build" in different places, eras, climates, whatever.

It's kind of slightly gentrified, but still very patchy and security conscious, edgy I suppose. Lots of corrugated iron roofs to indicate a depth of history. I don't remember the church but I kind of like it. A certain clarity of form.

So that's it. Let's not get bogged down. Just a quick exercise. Partly aimed at developing my sketching skills on the Microsoft Surface by the way. You have to practice. No other way.

 

 

I really enjoyed being a mature student at Wits and completing the last two years of my architecture studies after a long detour, as a bricklayer in Sheffield and then a teacher in Zimbabwe.

These sketches are from a history project. I chose to locate it in Vrededorp where I was staying. It's a fanciful piece of urban design but I entered into the spirit of the exercise with gusto. My first degree in London was a period of youthful rebellion and exploring the freedom of living in that wonderful city as the sixties merged into the seventies.

 

 

Approaching 40 with a young family to support I took the opportunity to study extremely seriously. Living on a low budget in a strange city and a society in transition. All the incentives were aligned for me to work hard and plumb the depths of my abilities.

 

Camilo Sitte was an interesting guy. Look him up. There have been times when I imagined myself updating his approach for the digital age, travelling around cities of the world with a laptop and executing quick urban studies using Revit. The idea of a BIM sketch is very appealing to me, but it's hard to pull off. It would be easy to blame the software, but that's not my style.

Never give up.

 

 

"A sense of place" is a term I first encountered in the late 80s when I started to re-engage with architects after a 15 year detour. I never really liked the term. What's wrong with "character" and "atmosphere" for example. Perfectly good words that ordinary people understand.

People like Ian Nairn and Gordon Cullen realised that town planners and self-conscious attempts to control "the way we build" had mostly resulted in a loss of character. In my teens I was heavily influenced by the dark and brooding Victorian built heritage which was being demolished at across Britain.

These images my own, recorded on black and white film, with fairly primitive cameras. I have retained an affection for somewhat run-down neighbourhoods, where housing and industry intermingle and the streets teem with the life of working people. Such was the Barnsley I grew up in.

I'm not arguing in favour of economic hardship. Just saying that designers should try to set aside their egos, open up to the spirit of the place they are building in and aim to enhance this with their own small contributions. Clients likewise.

Call it place-making if you must. I call it respect, humility and a light touch.