Q. Can the Average south African House Themselves :
A. I truly believe, that while the government has mad big strides in housing the Poor, in Cities and Towns across the county. In order to meet the growing demand and need for affordable and sustainable solutions, we as a country need to look beyond the RDP house. We need to look farther than bricks and mortar, and traditional building materials. We need to look to both at hi-tech and low-tech solutions, to housing. We need to give people the space to build themselves and the skills with which to build better, houses schools and gathering space.
I Believe there is a call, once again for simple uncluttered approach to architecture, a need to revisit that which is often instinctive, people have an intrinsic knowledge of their local place best, know best how it functions and will not function. Know best what they need, architect and designer are needed who will spend time to seek out the local communities where they design, and ask them what they need, the spaces they dream of, and the futures they imagine. As designers we have in our haste to dream big and imagine large possibilities, we have ignored the scale of work, which is needed to sustain the everyday and the ordinary of life.
In my dissertation entitled : ' The Side walk city' I undertook to examine the lived in experience of the hawker community in one section of the city of Johannesburg know then as ' the fashion district'. I considered transience and temporal spaces , only to discover there where layers of transience, and hawkers where better defined as, mobile rather than transient. Some-times returning to the same location for 20 years.
My solution what fairly gentle, seeking only to ensure the place of informality became more formalised, and allowed for stability amongst such marginalised peoples.
One of the things which fascinated me at the time, was the sense of space and place these 'shop keepers' where able to create as out of the air, from a crate, a box and piece of card board or tray. A sense a place one sees echoed in the informal housing sector.
A. I truly believe, that while the government has mad big strides in housing the Poor, in Cities and Towns across the county. In order to meet the growing demand and need for affordable and sustainable solutions, we as a country need to look beyond the RDP house. We need to look farther than bricks and mortar, and traditional building materials. We need to look to both at hi-tech and low-tech solutions, to housing. We need to give people the space to build themselves and the skills with which to build better, houses schools and gathering space.
I Believe there is a call, once again for simple uncluttered approach to architecture, a need to revisit that which is often instinctive, people have an intrinsic knowledge of their local place best, know best how it functions and will not function. Know best what they need, architect and designer are needed who will spend time to seek out the local communities where they design, and ask them what they need, the spaces they dream of, and the futures they imagine. As designers we have in our haste to dream big and imagine large possibilities, we have ignored the scale of work, which is needed to sustain the everyday and the ordinary of life.
In my dissertation entitled : ' The Side walk city' I undertook to examine the lived in experience of the hawker community in one section of the city of Johannesburg know then as ' the fashion district'. I considered transience and temporal spaces , only to discover there where layers of transience, and hawkers where better defined as, mobile rather than transient. Some-times returning to the same location for 20 years.
My solution what fairly gentle, seeking only to ensure the place of informality became more formalised, and allowed for stability amongst such marginalised peoples.
One of the things which fascinated me at the time, was the sense of space and place these 'shop keepers' where able to create as out of the air, from a crate, a box and piece of card board or tray. A sense a place one sees echoed in the informal housing sector.
