12/11/2015
Today the three master's students - Sanjay Jeevan, Kirsty Fick and Jaco Jonker - present their Major Design Projects.
I wish them a great day of rich and rewarding discussions with their examiners, and an exciting road ahead, for their architectural futures.
Looking back on a rich year of teaching and learning, here is an excerpt from the short text which launched the project at the beginning of 2015:
Unit 1
Alex Opper (with Lorenzo Nassimbeni)
ARCHITECTURE & INFRASTRUCTURE
LEARNING FROM MAIN REEF ROAD: UNDRAWING AND REDRAWING THE CITY INTO BEING
Unit 1 investigates infrastructure, at all scales, from the hard – the city systems that join its parts or, in the case of Johannesburg, often divide them – to the soft – the social and cultural webs of general and more specific publics that shape the ways we continuously negotiate our position in, and right to, the city.
The Johannesburg site for this investigation is Main Reef Road (MRR), also known as the R29). As its name suggests, this road topographically echoes the subterranean seam of gold which catalysed Johannesburg into existence. This underexploited asphalt strip – a potential ‘hypersurface’ of attractive possibility – runs east-west and, similar to the way a river or body of water in most other cities would do, has inadvertently defined the morphology of greater Johannesburg as a sprawl-driven conglomeration of mining towns. MRR – said to be the longest road with a single name in the southern hemisphere – in all its raw understatement quietly represents a more low-key register of what the skyline of Johannesburg‘s Central Business District achieves as an obvious visual translation of wealth. MRR serves Unit 1 as a lens of exacerbated possibility, a stage for the questioning, testing and stretching of what ‘infrastructure’ might mean and look like as we dive headlong into the increasing urban complexity of the 21st century.
Ostensibly Infrastructure is often understood as the basic organisational elements needed for a society or city to function effectively. In built environment terms, it usually refers to the ‘harder’, more fixed structures of support. Infrastructure can mean roads, bridges, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, and telecommunications; it can also refer to more typological, architectural building blocks such as hospitals, schools, factories, etc. Unit 1 takes a broader view of infrastructure by zooming in on often-overlooked and hidden elements of a society and the ‘softer’ and more flexible nature of ‘people as infrastructure’. MRR is the meandering line – a 1:1 scale drawing of sorts – the hard infrastructural backbone which ties together a host of seemingly ad-hoc, disparate infra-structures. These range from the identifiable programmatic patchwork – residual mine-dumps (unintentional landmarks); theme-parks; middle-class gated communities and so-called informal settlements – to more elusive relational networks of people, namely the ‘life-worlds’ of individuals and groups included or excluded in varying degrees from what could be referred to as the Johannesburg Dream.
In the tradition of Johannesburg’s exploitative history – physically, as a result of the discovery of gold and socially, via the engineering of difference through apartheid, MRR displays an ambiguous quality: Whilst it bridges the east and west of the city and the larger region one simultaneously encounters it as a meridian-like divider, between the poorer and marginalised South and the disproportionately wealthy North of Johannesburg. Despite its shortcomings, MRR has real potential to re-invent itself as a more rhizomatic mechanism, an urban weave. Its currently loose line, and the blurry ‘uitvalgrond’ condition flanking it, exhibits the potential to exploit its formlessness, not towards form, but towards processual integration, bridging and connection; toward a condition of infrastructural (hard & soft) integrity and inclusion. MRR has the prospect re-connote and recodify itself beyond Johannesburg’s overly simplistic branding rhetoric (‘Corridors of Freedom’), as a reanimated original element of powerful urban identification, both symbolically and physically.
In Unit 1 the typological over-simplification of the urban descriptor, ‘road’ will be thickened into site- and sub-site-specific hybrid propositions. Road may be, to consider one example, extended to ‘bridge’, as something which is able to span, link and connect in a different way. MRR – its currently marginalised and underexploited character – is used to reimagine, redraw and project possible futures. The unit aspires to re-vision MRR’s various flows as integrative, countering the fallout of its dated and more divisive DNA. In this vein, Unit 1 continues an interrogative rethinking of architectural teaching and learning tested over the last 7 years at UJ/FADA, of “’folding’ the [architectural] studio into the field”. The relationship between body, hand, eye and mind will be stretched through dialogues between the project context(s), and the architecturally integral practices of drawing, photography and film. Participants in this unit will, crucially, through immersion and connectedness, become one of the publics of MRR over the two-year duration of the project.
In conclusion, MRR’s complex conditions will drive architectural interventions that test assumptions about the underbelly of urban life. Investigations will shed light on the hidden forces, structures and systems that underpin the way a society functions, phenomena that are rarely seen, understood or appreciated. The road-as-map will serve as a permissive framework for a multiplicity of possible interventions at the metropolitan, neighbourhood and architectural scales, offering students a broad range of opportunities and possibilities to test and redefine existing understandings of ‘infrastructure’.
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