Architecture and Industrial Design

This qualitative study argues that occupant involvement in housing design and construction process should lead to more appropriate buildings that can sustain their usefulness with minimal changes. It documents the design of a house in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga, South Africa that uses Open Building (OB) principles so that the house adapts to the changing needs of the family and maintains its intergenerational value. This project centres the occupant in the design and construction process and considers the house flexible and conceived by many authors. Based on this worldview, we use the following tools: a literature review on OB, an OB analysis of low-cost housing, and analysis of the design project. We compare low-cost housing projects using four OB principles: how the project involves the occupant’s agency to build; how the project separates its elements to facilitate this agency; whether the project focuses on providing a housing product, or a housing process; and, how sustainably ...

There are two kinds of dreams. There are the dreams that we share, and there are dreams that are our own. Architecture, and the politics of dreams – or the dreams of politics, for that matter – form the context of this essay, and in particular how this thematized a design project in South African architectural education. In the South African context, where the past is often experienced as a nightmare, a fundamental inquiry into the precepts of architectural design and shared history has the potential to relocate repressed events of trauma. These events, which currently exist primarily in the historical record, can be translated into the present, and shown to still be active, but exerting their effects surreptitiously. This essay aims to presents brief readings of three design-research projects conducted in Unit 11 of the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) at the University of Johannesburg. A number of projects are being developed which work through (rather than resolve) concerns ...

In this article it is argued that, through adjustment of the point of view from which history is taught and theorised in architecture schools, grand narratives of progress can be critiqued and manipulated at a structural level. This could provide more lasting transformative practices than those produced by attempts to subvert such narratives by slotting alternative details into the existing structure.
The restructuring of points of view in history curricula is approached from critiques of two devices through which historical events are considered to be of objective significance: the canon and the timeline. The fundamental definitions and justifications of these devices are briefly unpacked, after which a proposal is made for alternative structures in the production of content for history and theory modules at university level. A brief description of some of the structural teaching and learning
devices of studio-based design courses serves to illustrate the diversity of modes of engagement available to managers, teachers and students in the discipline. Some of those devices are then transposed onto more conventional teaching and learning structures in order to test new possibilities for history and theory curricula.
The possible outcomes of a restructuring is briefly illustrated through an example of resulting ‘other timelines’ which are functional at the level of rendering history legible and comprehensible as a subject of study, but which could simultaneously move narratives of progress out of history and into the personal experience of students and tutors.

Organizations outlive us. Though they are often legally treated as human individuals, and though they share and mobilize much of the agency of persons, their comparative longevity makes them significant as heritage artefacts. They are distributed objects, making them difficult to conceive of as ‘whole’, but architecture has, since the advent of ‘programme’ as a central concern, been in the service of producing images of organizational structures in the form of buildings.

Organizational structures are represented by and through the architecture to which they give form. There is, however, a fair amount of content that is not represented by buildings, but that may nonetheless be able to take the form of ‘built artefacts’. Examples of such content include (but are not limited to); curricular structures, hierarchical relationships in human resources, changes in use patterns over time, and policy development and implementation. An exploration of the modelling, mapping, representation and manifestation of a selection of those artefacts that currently fall in the void between building design on the one hand, and the organizations that commission buildings on the other, forms the backdrop of this paper.

Digital and virtual representations of architecture invite us to imagine new directions for architectural practice that go beyond the design of buildings, while remaining located in the representation of space, the manifestation of aesthetically accessible objects, and the management of information.

This paper will describe attempts at developing representations of organizational structures undertaken in postgraduate programmes (MArch and DArch) at the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design at the Tshwane University of Technology. The aim is to make suggestions for expanding the influence and capacity of architectural practice, while developing intuitively accessible tools with which to grasp the forces which have historically given form to our world, and continue to do so in the present.

In this essay, I'm going to argue that the debate on identity in South African architecture (particularly for anyone who is tired of it and would like the debate to be settled), will never be settled. This is because, rather than containing or embodying identity, architecture identifies as one of its most basic operations.

There are two futures-there is the future that exists and the future that is made. In time, we move forwards while facing backwards, never really knowing what lies ahead behind our backs. We interpolate the future that exists from our history, recent and ancient, as we look for patterns and try to determine their hidden origins which lie behind us in the unknown ahead. But to plan, architects have another way of predicting the future. Through drawing and modelling, architects make images of structures that exist in the future, then, through political and material organization and construction, we mobilise communities to bring that future into being. That process involves a lot of contingency, and the original design is open to enormously varied influences as it passes through the surface of representation into our world.