[A lecture delivered at the University of Johannesburg, 18 May 2022]

The story of architectural modernism has been conventionally told through a particular range of  narratives and cannons that are largely Euro-American - with style, technology, climate, housing and town planning being some of the most common lenses through which to understand and engage it.

Yet due to the global reach of western colonialism at the time of its origins, the impacts, experiences and meanings of modernism in colonial Africa and elsewhere is vastly more extensive and complex. In African contexts for example, "African modernism" at the time of national independence would later become another important area of scholarship.

Still more recently, some scholars have begun to address the question of the 'colonial modern', since modernism as an art-architecture movement that emerged out of the late colonial period embodied many of its premises and outlooks. This remains a fundamental dimension of modernism that is also one of its most neglected areas of scholarship.

The lecture addresses this question of the colonial modern - not an "African modernism" (i.e. a question of region or style), but "African/modernism" (as a question of coloniality).

Sources:

Chipkin, C. M. 1993. Johannesburg Style - Architecture & Society 1880s - 1960s. Cape Town: David Phillip.

Fletcher, B. 1905. A history of architecture on the Comparative Method. London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co.

Hickel, J. 2014. ‘Engineering the Township Home: Domestic Transformations and Urban Revolutionary Consciousness’, in Ekhaya: The Politics of Home in Kwazulu-Natal, ed. by Meghan Healy-Clancy and Jason Hickel. Pietermaritzburg, SA: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, pp. 131–61

Le Corbusier. 1986 [1931]. Towards a New Architecture. Translated by Frederick Etchells. New York: Dover Publications.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret). 1987. Journey to the east. Translated by Ivan Zaknic and Nicole Pertuiset. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Image credit: Santiago Borja's 'Destinerrance', installed at Villa Savoye, 2011, Poissy, France.

[A panel discussion at the conference "RISE AFRICA 2022: Human Rights in the context of African Cities", 23-25 May 2022]

Excerpt:

"Housing shortage is a key issue in virtually all the major cities of the continent which are urbanising. And they're all going to be faced, and already facing, housing shortages.

Within the the South African context, the main model we have is housing mega-projects - huge projects that are usually built on the periphery of cities by and large. That is where they have been built over the last decades. And they come with many challenges: they are far away from economic opportunities; they require lengthy travel distances; there are all the expenses that come with living so far away; and not living in a livable environment where there are social resources, cultural resources, and economic opportunities, etc. So that model does not work very efficiently. And we all know this already. So we are struggling to come up with new new solutions and strategies.

Now, the way people build housing themselves in informal settlements, or generally known as slums, people find spaces within the city. This is especially so for migrants, because those are the first places they go to. Those are the low-income places where you don't have to spend a fortune for rental. Those become "arrival cities". Those informal settlements are often on the periphery of cities generally.

And we have not yet learned what we can learn from so-called 'informal' processes. How we can develop other kinds of housing solutions that are not necessarily top-down, that are not dependent on the big corporations' construction materials, but rather are trying to understand local systems and working with those informal processes. We haven't yet really found a way to do that. And so we haven't really been able to meet the multiple challenges that we face.

And human settlements are not just about producing a shelter for people. It's about producing a living environment with all of its complexities - social, cultural, economic, familial. And so the issue of migrancy, along with xenophobia and xenophobic violence, is also part of creating human settlements. In South Africa, even the citizens don't really know how to live with one another because of our long centuries-old colonial history, which we share with other parts of the continent. And our apartheid history is also shared with settler societies in other parts of the continent. Apartheid is not so much a unique South African phenomenon. In the early part of the 20th century apartheid was, as some scholars have described it, almost a continent-wide African phenomenon in urban spaces. So human settlements are also about this. How do citizens even live with one another? How do we create social cohesion among citizens? And then the migrancy issues are even another layer - how do we live with people that have come from other parts of the country as internal migrants, or external migrants from beyond the border.

So there are so many challenges, and we haven't yet even developed on scale the strategies to deal with them. But those are some of the issues that human settlements have to address, that it's not just about shelter. Rather, it is about where you locate those settlements, where you build them, does it provide economic opportunities, how does it facilitate and help people to live together both among citizens and also amongst migrants, and is it close to economic opportunities where people can actually have a dignified life.

Three of the most fundamental things that we need to live in a humane way is family, food, and safety. All human beings need these things. And we are struggling to even fulfil those basic dimensions of dignity and respect that we need to have in the city. And human settlements - the way we understand them and how we build strategies - has to accommodate all of those things and not work against them."

The full conference session is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV3d00UNijg

Further information:

The presentation is an inter-disciplinary study of the making of race, landscape and the South African city.  Spanning three centuries, it reveals key historical moments where ‘landscape’ was radically reimagined. It argues that a similar radical imagining is necessary today, to transform an untransformed city and social landscape.

The paper was delivered at the conference, "In whose place? Confronting vestiges of the colonial landscape in Africa" (20-21 May 2021) (Session 2 - "Re-imaginings"). The conference was a collaboration between the 'History Workshop' and the 'School of Architecture & Planning' at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The full conference is available on the History Workshop channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS7H...).

This is the fourth in a series on ‘critical tools’, that helps to enable critical readings of contemporary architecture in South Africa.

In this lecture I discuss how the minor professional representation by those ‘previously’ disadvantaged extends similarly into other academic, scholarship and institutional spaces - and hence weighs extensively and profoundly upon the very authorship of the discipline itself.

"[T]he hegemonic condition of constituents and authorship ... as facts of demographics ... are beyond dispute, even though some may find them alarming given their relative scarcity in scholarship and taboo in public discourse." (Toffa 2020:44-45)

Although notions of multiculturalism and diversity generally occupy and are celebrated as central themes in 'contemporary' South African architecture, they often do so as abstractions or marked with cognitive dissonance, within what in effect are often normalised conditions of coloniality.

Sources:

Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), 2018, Report on grouped peer review of scholarly journals in architecture, built environment and engineering, viewed 19 October 2018, from https://doi.org/10.17159/assaf.2018/0023.

Fletcher, B. 1905. A history of architecture on the Comparative Method. London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co.

Toffa, T., 2020, ‘Learning to speak? Of transformation, race and the colonialities of architecture’, in A.O.S. Osman (ed.), Cities, space and power, The Built Environment in Emerging Economies (BEinEE): Cities, Space and Transformation Book series Volume 1, pp. 29–76, AOSIS, Cape Town.

This is the third in a series on ‘critical tools’, that helps to enable critical readings of contemporary architecture in South Africa.

In this lecture I look at the notion of 'transformation', generally understood as a project of racial equity to redress the racial inequalities of apartheid-colonialism. It typically entails rubrics that rely on the quantitative monitoring of ‘race’ as an indicator of redress in the ‘post’-apartheid period. In architecture, this has revealed the alarming – in racial terms – ‘slow rate of transformation’ (as it is often uncritically described), with little to no change in the severely skewed racial makeup of professional architects over the last decade (approximately 85% remain classified as ‘White’, although constituting less than 10% of the population of the country).

A closer reading of these phenomena also reveal that they are far from linear, 'slow', or even a 'rate' at all.

"[T]he very factors within the architectural status quo that have ‘haunted’ transformational change (as SAIA president Sindile Ngonyama put it) likewise will also likely implicate any new initiatives. As SAIA’s Executive Manager for Transformation explained: ‘The word “transformation” in South Africa is generally not easily embraced … and it is normally accompanied with the fear of the unknown’ (Sebe 2015). A refocus on transformation may at the same time therefore also produce its exact opposite, such as counter-efforts to reassure existing stakeholders that the status quo is in fact not in danger of any significant change. (...) A (post)colonial-apartheid mode of transformation is thus always ‘doubled’, advanced and crippled at the same time." (Toffa 2020:42)

Sources:

South African Council for the Architectural Profession (SACAP), 2015, Annual Report 2014/2015, viewed 07 July 2019, from https://www.sacapsa.com/page/AnnualReports.

South African Institute of Architects (SAIA), 2015, Annual Report 2014/2015, Cape Media Corporation, Cape Town.

Toffa, T., 2020, ‘Learning to speak? Of transformation, race and the colonialities of architecture’, in A.O.S. Osman (ed.), Cities, space and power, The Built Environment in Emerging Economies (BEinEE): Cities, Space and Transformation Book series Volume 1, pp. 29–76, AOSIS, Cape Town.

This is the second in a series on ‘critical tools’, that helps to enable critical readings of contemporary architecture in South Africa.

In this lecture I discuss the unnamed yet pervasive politics that underlies much of architectural discourse:

“While fully embracing topics such as multiculturalism, health or the environment on the one hand, architecture’s Janus-faced politics on the other hand also simultaneously appears to embody and beget an acute reluctance to engage with questions of race, racialized experience, and virtually all topics and events which recall, implicate and locate colonialism and apartheid in present disciplinary and professional structures rather than in ‘the past’ – a notion upon which virtually all (post)colonial disciplinary discourse and structures are premised. This unnamed but nonetheless very deliberate politics is inflected in virtually all discourses and debates.” (Toffa 2020:34)

The lecture was presented for Architectural History & Theory at the GSA, University of Johannesburg.

Sources:

Joubert, O. (ed.), 2009, 10+ years 100+ buildings – Architecture in a democratic South Africa, Bell-Roberts Publishing, Cape Town.

Toffa, T., 2020, ‘Learning to speak? Of transformation, race and the colonialities of architecture’, in A.O.S. Osman (ed.), Cities, space and power, The Built Environment in Emerging Economies (BEinEE): Cities, Space and Transformation Book series Volume 1, pp. 29–76, AOSIS, Cape Town.

This is the first in a series on ‘critical tools’, that helps to enable a reading of contemporary architecture in South Africa, not as zones of pure ‘disciplinary’ knowledges, but rather as a historically inflected, constructed or contingent body of thought, practices and institutions.

In this lecture I look at the sway of colonialism/apartheid in the formation of architectural politics and practice. In particular, I discuss the emergence of the informal pressure group Architects Against Apartheid (AAP) in Johannesburg in 1986, and its failed challenge to a complicit but resistant architectural status quo in the last years of apartheid.

"Many professional groups were openly challenging government policies — especially the doctors and lawyers. As a profession the architects, though, were as quiet as mice ... AAP members tried to make colleagues aware of how the gross application of apartheid ideology to architecture was distorting the moral and ethical basis of the profession in South Africa." (Schlapobersky et al 1994:17)

Sources:

Schlapobersky, I., Chipkin, C. & Paine, H., 1994, ‘Architects Against Apartheid (AAP)’, Architecture SA: Journal of the Institute of South African Architects 1994 (March–April), 17–18.