Since the end of Apartheid, there has been a new orientation in South African art and design, turning away from the colonial aesthetics to new types of African expression. This book examines some of the fascinating and impressive works of contemporary public architecture that 'concretize' imaginative dialogues with African landscapes, craft and indigenous traditions.

Since the end of Apartheid, there has been a new orientation in South African art and design, turning away from the colonial aesthetics to new types of African expression. This book examines some of the fascinating and impressive works of contemporary public architecture that 'concretise' imaginative dialogues with African landscapes, craft and indigenous traditions. Referring to Frantz Fanon's classic study of colonised subjectivity, 'Black Skin, White Masks', Noble contends that Fanon's metaphors of mask and skin are suggestive for architectural criticism, in the context of post-Apartheid public design. Taking South Africa's first democratic election of 1994 as its starting point, the book focuses on projects that were won in architectural competitions. Such competitions are conceived within ideological debates and studying them allows for an examination of the interrelationships between architecture, politics and culture. The book offers insights into these debates through interviews with key parties concerned - architects, competition jurors, politicians, council and city officials, artists and crafters, as well as people who are involved in the day-to-day life of the buildings in question.

Time and Transformation in Architecture, edited by Tuuli Lähdesmäki, approaches architecture and the built environment from an interdisciplinary point of view by emphasizing in its theoretical discussions and empirical analysis the dimensions of time, temporality, and transformation—and their relation to human experiences, behavior, and practices. The volume consists of seven chapters that explore the following questions: How do architectural ideas, ideals, and meanings emerge, develop, and transform? How is architecture manifested in relation to time, time-space, and the social dimensions it entails and produces? The volume provides both multifaceted theoretical discussions on time and temporality in architecture and empirical case studies around the globe in which these theories and conceptualizations are tested and explored. Contributors are Eiman Ahmed Elwidaa, André van Graan, June Jordaan, Joongsub Kim, Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Assumpta Nnaggenda-Musana, Sanja Rodeš and Smaranda Spânu.

Through a specific architectural lens, this book exposes the role the British Empire played in the development of apartheid. Through reference to previously unexamined archival material, the book uncovers a myriad of mechanisms through which Empire laid the foundations onto which the edifice of apartheid was built. It unearths the significant role British architects and British architectural ideas played in facilitating white dominance and racial segregation in pre-apartheid Cape Town. To achieve this, the book follows the progenitor of the Garden City Movement, Ebenezer Howard, in its tripartite structure of Country/Town/Suburb, acknowledging the Garden City Movement's dominance at the Cape at the time. This tripartite structure also provides a significant match to postcolonial schemas of Self/Other/Same which underpin the three parts to the book. Much is owed to Edward Said's discourse-analytical approach in Orientalism - and the work of Homi Bhabha - in the definition and interpretation of archival material. This material ranges across written and visual representations in journals and newspapers, through exhibitions and events, to legislative acts, as well as the physicality of the various architectural objects studied. The book concludes by drawing attention to the ideological potency of architecture which tends to be veiled more so through its ubiquitous presence and in doing so, it presents not only a story peculiar to Imperial Cape Town, but one inherent to architecture more broadly. The concluding chapter also provides a timely mirror for the machinations currently at play in establishing a 'post-apartheid' architecture and urbanity in the 'new' South Africa.

This book explores the growing spatial inequality in contemporary cities, and the opportunity of reframing the role of public open space as a tool of inclusion in a context of an increasing economic gap between the urban poor and rich. The first part outlines the geographical and theoretical frames of reference, which are then tested in the analysis of a case study: Cape Town. This city in South Africa was selected since its spatial aspects of separation are particularly evident due to the legacy of both apartheid and modernism. The examination of the policies of the City of Cape Town confirms the rising attention to public space since the 1990s. This slow progress of desegregation is tested through a critical study of one of the most disadvantaged areas of the city, Khayelitsha. The book explores the relevance and impact of an urban-design project, and reframes the role of public open space not only as a tool for restructuring the apartheid city, but also for reinterpreting other fragmented contemporary cities.

In this book, Duane Jethro creates a framework for understanding the role of the senses in processes of heritage formation. He shows how the senses were important for crafting and successfully deploying new, nation-building heritage projects in South Africa during the postapartheid period. The book also highlights how heritage dynamics are entangled in evocative, changing sensory worlds.Jethro uses five case studies that correlate with the five main Western senses. Examples include touch and the ruination of a series of art memorials; how vision was mobilised to assert the authority of the state-sponsored Freedom Park project in Pretoria; how smell memories of apartheid-era social life in Cape Town informed contemporary struggles for belonging after forced removal; how taste informed debates about the attempted rebranding of Heritage Day as barbecue day; and how the sound of the vuvuzela, popularized during the FIFA 2010 Football World Cup, helped legitimize its unofficial African and South African heritage status.This book makes a valuable contribution to the field of sensory studies and, with its focus on aesthetics and material culture, is in sync with the broader material turn in the humanities.

This study of the armed wing of the African National Congress also “contributes significantly to scholarship on liberation movements more broadly.”—Gary Baines, author of South Africa’s Border War For nearly three decades, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), known as Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), waged a violent revolutionary struggle against the apartheid state in South Africa. Stephen Davis works with extensive oral testimonies and the heroic myths that were constructed after 1994 to offer a new history of this movement. Davis deftly addresses the histories that reinforce the legitimacy of the ANC as a ruling party, its longstanding entanglement with the South African Communist Party, and efforts to consolidate a single narrative of struggle and renewal in concrete museums and memorials. Davis shows that the history of MK is more complicated and ambiguous than previous laudatory accounts would have us believe, and in doing so he discloses the contradictions of the liberation struggle as well as its political manifestations.