Fixing a Road in Johannesburg: 26′10 Architects on Informal Architecture

This is a pretty relevant interview for me, and reveals some truths about attempting to work with informal settlements. 

It’s a pretty long article, but this is a section about 26′10 Architects actually attempting to complete a project.  I think it’s interesting because the ‘reuse’ of an existing building was actually one of the methods I proposed for providing space for program in the settlement of Dharavi. 

Can you tell me about the cinema project you worked on in Soweto?

TD: Yes. And that’s the project we formed our working relationship approach around. It was really down to budget—basically there was just no money. What we were asked to do is reinvent or reimagine this building that was a cinema for many years in Soweto. For forty-eight years it was really a cultural meeting point, and also the social life of the community. It was burned down and the building was stolen, literally, in a couple of weeks. It was just ripped apart. Once it was set alight people just recycled the building into their own houses. The context that we had to work in was mind-boggling. You very much start to question your role as architect as you experience the fragility of the context. We designed a scheme that was really additive, that could be done over many years, in phases, and tied to more cultural events. And even for that there wasn’t money. And we just thought, well, the sessions we had in our office, we’ll just transfer some of them to Soweto in order to recreate the place of cultural happening. And so weirdly, the site sort of regained its cultural significance. And then it got its own life again, and people started performing in it again.

Are they still using it?

TD: Not really. We had been lobbying the city government to at least secure the ruin, which they haven’t done, and the community itself has eventually decided to destroy it because at night it was a very dangerous place. So the front part of the ruin’s now collapsed. It’s a spectacular failure in many regards, but it also taught us some very valuable and hard lessons—you know, the limits of architecture and how it can actually just become a big liability sometimes. The building has to be staffed, programmed, managed, and this takes skill and money, which was exactly the lack. So we realized that in this context buildings and institutions need to grow around people’s needs and capacity, they need to evolve and be more adaptable. This is a fundamentally different insight into architecture which is taught, practiced, and mythologized as timeless, fixed, and finite….

It’s not a problem unique to South Africa. We were at a conference in London where a bunch of artists complained about exactly that. The government-sponsored Bilbao effect requires this spectacular building and these grand institutions, but it swallows up so many resources that could actually be used to stimulate real cultural invention. And in the South African case we have some real new hybrid post-apartheid identities to be formed. It’s not in the Tate Modern where new culture gets created, or the Guggenheim. That’s where established culture is portrayed. But new culture is created in the very in-between spaces, the most unlikely spaces. And it’s created by people, not by buildings.

AG: The main concept of that project was that the architecture follows the program. It’s not like the white elephant where you first have the building and then you try and put the program in. The idea was basically starting with the artifacts that were found on-site, just securing the ruin and leveling the floor. We worked on a dance and film program over five years that would increase in density and that would also sort of emerge. But unfortunately we could not get anybody to sponsor the money to secure the ruin. In fact, available city resources were all tied up in the construction of a symbolic square being built nearby to commemorate the signing of the Freedom Charter in 1956.

Therefore we ended up just painting a wall white and having a mobile film resource unit projecting movies. And it was absolutely magical, and exactly what the community asked for—it was bringing the cinema back to the area. It didn’t actually need a building, it just needed a projector and a film. If we had waited for the funding that never arrived there would never have been another film shown on this site.

That was a very important lesson for our practice. Architects are all trained to design these icon buildings all the time, but in fact one has to take a step back and think, what does the community need, and what can actually have the biggest impact with the minimal resources to be spent?

Via ArchDaily