kagablog

South African architecture has been a public art without a public realm: the salons, coffee houses, civic causes, free press, open debates and reasoned consensus of an ideal bourgeoisie never arose except in the unending rehearsals for civic society known as universities.

Even imaginative revolt was a strictly personal matter with Battiss harbouring a republic in his backyard, Preller painting cosmopolitanism in private while Hlungwane addressed multitudes in heaven

For most of their history the South African state and the economy had been too tightly woven together to bother about legitimacy through public opinion.

If a public were sought, who would they have been? the propertied white males? The vaster disenfranchised counterpublic of workers and women? the formless unnameable ‘rural population’ deftly caricatured as Nations?

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Post 1994 policy bundled these potential publics together in an abstract liberal notion of citizenship and began to emancipate the market from the state , creating for the first time the classic conditions for a public realm—a potential arena of debate, an audience for a free press , arbiters of taste , self defining subjects of history, canny, self-interested consumers, collective, dutiful citizens and informed legitimisers of the state .

With all these simple conditions met, South Africa would be a Public

The comedians and satirists were the pioneer settlers in the uninhabited new public realm

From Evita Bezuidenhout to Bitterkomix, from William Kentridge to Barry Hilton the spectrum of humour and irony framed up the possible ways of being South African, well in advance of any takers.

The universities and institutions of knowledge were the next explorers, readjusting their public service to a public yet to come- debating the relevance of curriculum to citizenship, of public access to public good and wondering, as public opinion makers, where to draw the legitimizing line between the state, the marketplace and themselves.

The architects were the third wave to disappear into the future.

Sensing a way to escape the labyrinth of idiosyncratic tastes ( the clients , their own, the whimsical monumentalising states, the feudal, aggrandising corporates) into a realm where architecture might become a public fact like the news, the laws, a marriage or a murder- with an audience, a debate, an evolving consensus, implicit norms and an identity . Architects made their mental trek into the South African public realm by investigating the possible subjects of a new architecture.

Post 94 architects have each acquired the ability to work like dramatists inventing characters- client, user, public and nation personae - that nobody has seen before but which everybody will soon come to see themselves in.

What separates these South African schemes from utopias scattered in the past is that they are not directly imagined buildings of a different social condition.

Instead, like novelists who imagine their ideal reader or composers looking for a perfect player, a very specific architectural enactor is called up first , an indivisible client- user-critic- public, a potent, detailed fiction from which the building is later carefully unfolded.

Who exactly are these dense interlocutors of the new architectural imagination? They are certainly not derived from aesthetic experience, for the post 94 idiom displays a Duchampian literalness, art-brut .tectonics and a militant unadornedness.

It is as if proof by senses were too individual, too suggestive of taste or multiculturally contested to be part of that character weaving the New Public

Instead, aesthetic judgement has been replaced by an extremely nuanced and informed historical imagination.

New kinds of sceptical .archivists have recovered the past , repopulating every space in the new South Africa with exact spectres of the dispossessed, the voiceless and misconstrued, resurrecting,-with unavoidable pathos- the right and claims of vanished people to determine the shape and fate of the new public realm.

When South African New Architecture discloses its imagined enactor, it is always constructed of these dense layers of historical and contextual events.

South African civic awareness is an archaeological dig, a forensic, ethical search in which the living try to understand what the dead might ask for in the present

The new architectural imagination is thus as much at home with the dead as with the client , finding finer contours of the public realm in past lives lived without access to it rather than in its speculative and embattled present.

Paralleling the new historiography and relaying it into architecture is Spatial Geography, polemically mixing registers and sources.

This voracious discipline sceptically erodes the political and juridical norms of the public realm that arose in 1994 – and thereafter endlessly recycled by bureaucrats, city administrations and the state.

The adventurous spatial deftness of new South African public buildings -their witty critiques of monumentality - owes much to the deadpan irony of social geographers making the struggles, stakes and different underlying tempos of public space imaginable to design.

New art history, visual culture studies and their artist exponents fortify the claims to public recognition of countercultures, minorities and identities in dissent.

A weapon against the commercial media (a Pandora’s Box of passive leisure and consumer incentive opened by the devolution of state media) these new visual critiques deepen the understanding of what an existence free of cliché and coercion in the public realm might be.

Through a dialogue with this coming visual sensibility the New Architects have been able to fit themselves with a sense of facilitating identities in place of their lost aesthetic mode, allowing them to better imagine how the coming publics want to see, feel, move and be seen-without caricature, prejudice or persuasion- in their bid for recognition.

Sparse as it is, the public realm is neither free, benign nor homogenous.

The luminous personae imagined within the New Architecture belong to a deeply dysfunctional family

Corporates deform the public realm by creating direct feudal-style relations to the state , tying legislation change to the immediate private ends of the market- the rash of inane and unwanted housing developments being the tip of this iceberg of professional lobbyists, spin doctors, and loophole seekers.

Covert corporate-state relations are not likely to foster enlarged public debate until they strip-mine a nature reserve or build a nuclear reactor downtown

New SA Architects remain wholly deprived of the overt relations between commercial and public interests that made London or New York possible.

Non Governmental Organisations filled the vacuum of state welfare delivery and have become the self-appointed spokespersons for citizens needing state assistance.

Much of the irrationality of public housing is due to ‘representative organisations’ rechanneling what should have been an inaugurating public debate on the undoing of separate development and reparative reurbanisation.

Until the welfare state becomes accessible to its citizens again, South African architects will be deprived of their engagement with the deepest defining issue of the Modern Movement and its critics- public housing.

The media were transformed from a state tool into a commercial market and, despite public service pledges, have constantly narrowed their obligation to public information and open debate.

The forced march through fordism to passive consumerism and a credit economy was accompanied by all media promulgating lifestyle and commodity cults.

The consumer taste for living in Provence after hours testifies to this image-driven trade in exile from public life

Built equivalents of Hummers and porn-movie sets are the norm, making domestic buildings that are not compounds of fantasy seem ascetic and deeply eccentric

A freely lived personal life becomes architecturally unimaginable in the optic of Reality TV- New South African architects are set an impossible quest for an architecture of privacy beyond the invading form of the commodity.

Corporate positioning, paternalistic public administration and manipulative media are not new to South Africa but such twists in the plot of architecturally imagined public life are becoming surprisingly vulnerable to adverse publicity and unmasking, their power being based on our silence.

Engaging with the present along the narrow line of an imagined public , the new South African architects have done something without precedent - they have stilled architecture and themselves in order to redraw another, entirely conjectured, public being- part logical, part empirical -whose best image is scattered amongst 150 or so schemes and others yet to come.

If these often puzzling works have a present identity, it is as weapons in the growing skirmishes of ideas, experiences and values that unexpectedly define the public realm-, lighting a little of its future and sounding the deep silence of its present..

New Architecture in South Africa might consolidate into an art of wrenching counterfactual imagination, no longer primarily spatial or visual like its predecessors but like theatre , film or novel , able to derive new forms of the public through new forms of the personal..

South African architecture died to itself in order to live as an ideal public story- the generation under fifty is chapter one in its telling.