 All right. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for coming tonight. And it's my pleasure to introduce Joe Noero. He is a principal and Noero Architects and a tenured professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. An internationally recognized and award-winning architect, he has designed and built more than 200 buildings throughout Southern Africa, as well as the United States. Working across a variety of scales and building types from individual houses to large-scale cultural and institutional buildings from law courts to schools. His office originally founded in 1984 in Johannesburg. He relocated to Cape Town in 2000 and also has an office in Port Elizabeth. Between 1999 and 2012, he worked with Heinrich Wolf. And in this practice, which he began in 1984, as I said, it's very interesting. The start and continued work is done through a careful grounding and sense of place. Dedication to working through conditions of what he calls the extraordinary and the extraordinary, specifically emphasizing, and this is a quote, great potential exists in transforming the everyday lives of our cities and people by making extraordinary works whose origin lies in the everyday practices of people. The two are inextricably interwoven. The one cannot comfortably exist without the other. Among his many works, which I'm very excited to see tonight and hear him speak about, I particularly appreciate his project that he did for the 2012 Venice Biennial, Common Ground, Different Worlds. It was made up of actually two projects, but one in particular I think is quite incredible, which is a drawing that is over nine meters long that he spent six months drawing by hand, which was a one to 100 plan of the historic shack settlement in Port Elizabeth, known as the Red Location District, the first settled black township of Port Elizabeth as a protest against contemporary architecture's abandonment of the plan. These projects, that project among others, projects and built works have been published in journals, many of which you will know, Architectural Review, the RIBA Journal, Architecture Record, Harvard Design Review, Architectural Association Files and so on. His work has been exhibited at the Maxi in Rome at MoMA and here in New York in the exhibition called An Architecture of Social Engagement, Exhibition Small Project Big Change, curated by Andres Lepic. The Venice Biennial, as I've mentioned, Sao Paulo Biennial, Singapore Biennial, and so on is included in the National Gallery of Art in Cape Town and the Art Institute of Chicago. His practices won a number of architectural awards, particularly for the Red Location Museum, it won the Lubetkin Prize from the RIBA, was also awarded the Best Building in the World in 2012 from ICON, as well as the Ernske Prize from the Nordic Association of Architects and he's won also 12 Merit Awards for Outstanding Design, Architecture Project Awards, the Gold Medal for Architecture in 2010 and Award of Excellence for the Soweto Career Center in 1994, all from the South African Institute of Architects. He's also an international fellow of the RIBA as well as a fellow here of the AIA. Please join me in welcoming Joe to the stand. Thank you very much, Hillary, and thank you for your very kind introduction and just thank you to Columbia School of Architecture for inviting me to come and talk to you. It's a long trip from Cape Town, but it's been worth it and you live in a wonderful city, so I'm very pleased to be here. I thought that what I would talk to you about tonight is, you know, the title of the talk is Architectural and Noisy Democracy and that really forms the second half of what I want to talk about, but I would have talked to you about two conditions of before and after, the before being the work that I made in South Africa during the period from 1980 leading up to 1994 and then the work after that. And as you can probably guess, it was work done in two very different socio-political contexts, the one under the rule of apartheid and the other after liberation 1994 under the aegis of a constitutional democracy, which I must tell everyone who's sitting here tonight, don't believe the news you hear about South Africa. We're doing very well. Our constitutional democracy is thriving. Our only problem is that we have a corrupt president, but we get to throw him out of power in December. We'll install a new one. We'll get rid of him quicker than you can get rid of Donald Trump. I can promise you. I run a very spoil, just give you a bit of background to me. I was very interested to read Hillary's samples, some of her work and some of her writings and like her run a small practice. We've probably at most about four, five, six people, most times four people. We only do certain work. We only do, we don't work for commercial clients. I can't work for people who see my work only in terms of profit, maximizing my labor just for profit. If there's no architectural intention on the work, I'm not prepared to do it. We have a whole lot of quirks in our office. For example, we won't build any houses larger than 150 square meters, simply because we have a view on the office that we have a housing shortage in our country and it's crazy when you have a housing shortage that you have people who live in two or 3,000 square meter houses, those huge big Mac mansions that you see around the world. So that's our prescription. We say we believe in maximum standards rather than minimum standards and we work hard towards that. Just as a joke, we have all kinds of amazing responses from people who come to us to ask us to do private houses and we describe to them this rule that we have, including one recently which was from someone who actually has employed us to do a small house, but he wanted a much bigger house. He asked us whether the 150 square meters included the garage and I told him no, cars are like dogs, they sleep outside at night time. So South Africa is where you see it and now I'm sorry but Hillary doesn't seem to be working. Are you press that one? Is it that side? Oh, sorry, I got the wrong one. I'm going to just give you, try and give you a very brief idea of South Africa. Thank you. It's a really curious country. Probably one of the most diverse countries in the world. Our cities suffer from two really extreme conditions. First of all, most of the big cities were built following the dictates of modern town planning which is strict segregation of land use. So we have the ideal modern city but what makes matters even worse is that when you overlay that with racial segregation, in other words, different races live in different parts of the city, you land up with severely dysfunctional cities and our cities are really unworkable at the present moment and are debilitating particularly for the urban poor. This is an image from the 1960s of Hillbrough which at the time was the second most dense residential area in the world after Hong Kong. This is from the apartheid days as well, the manner in which black people were housed in large dormitory towns on the outskirts of cities, they didn't have any rights to live in those houses. They were simply there as temporary sojourners and the state controlled every aspect of their lives. These places still exist today. And what we find happening in our cities today where you get this collapse or this collision between the formerly planned settlement which you can see on the left and the informal spontaneous illegal settlement which you see on the right. At the moment in our country about 80% of all housing is built in this manner, this illegal spontaneous manner, no services and no means of control, what server who builds what and where. We have an extraordinary history of wonderful vernacular building traditions that stretch back hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years and including, I'll just give you some examples here of inter-Bailey housing which is in the northern, so-called Northern Transvaal. It's now just on the outskirts of Khating with unbelievably rich special ideas including this idea of a series of threshold spaces that you enter through and depending upon your relationship with the family you can only go so far, but the closer you are to the family the further you can penetrate into those spaces. And the interiors of the spaces are just as beautifully made as the exterior. I'm very interested in representations of the city by African artists and in what way do they tell us about another way of imagining the city because I'm very aware of myself as a white South African having brought up in a Western tradition of architecture and aesthetics and trying very hard to try and find new ways of how to unlock the potential that being in South Africa can mean. You'll notice that when I talk tonight I don't talk about African architecture, I think that's a crazy idea. I talk about other South African or Cape Town architecture. And this again, collision that you find all the way through our cities, elevated highways built in the tradition of the 1960s sweeping around the outskirts of the city to help relieve congestion. And then this extraordinary space that's made and of how people occupy always illegally for shelter, for markets and other things and this kind of reading between these two very, very different ways of occupying the city. One of the things that I think is for me most interesting about where I live in South Africa is that in the African languages, in the Anguni languages and the part of the country that I live in, there is no word to describe the beautiful as a disinterested property like Emmanuel Kant and others described. Something can only be beautiful if it's useful. And I always find that this fantastic email letter that was sent by a famous Zulu artist, Tito Zungo to Ronald Lukak, and some of you might know, actually makes the aeroplane, makes a beautiful image of a modern aeroplane but it's really there to tell you that this is an email letter. So it's done with purpose. And the extraordinary creative ability that young people have in our country who these are unschooled kids living in a shack settlement in the outskirts of Cape Town. They live in the flight path of the big aeroplanes that land and take off at Cape Town International Airport and they make fully a scaled model perfectly proportioned of a jumbo jet with working parts that is made out of flattened oil cans and Coca-Cola cans and then painted up. What's interesting about it is the power of advertising because the Pan Am references to the Peter Stuyvesant adverts that we have right throughout the country. One of the people whose work I've been aware of for a long, long time, I'm interested in as learnable about it in Italy and in a way, I kind of feel a sympathy with her because I have a history, I was born in South Africa, but my parents are first generation South Africans and they have a strong connection or they had a strong connection to Europe and that idea of living in Europe and living in Africa and South Africa and the tensions that it sets up. And this fantastic introduction to an exhibition that she organized in Brazil many, many years ago where she talks about the beautiful and the ugly and she talks about how can we re-describe the way in which we make something that is beautiful but in ways that we can't imagine as Westerners but which actually feeds into the imagination of people outside of that world. When I first started off my practice in the early 80s, I was really fortunate by some accident. I met people in London and I was coming back to South Africa after having studied there to meet up with this man who is truly remarkable. He's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Prize winner and I think one of the heroes of our country. At that stage, he was the Archdeacon of the Cathedral in Johannesburg and he took a liking to me. I met him just to meet with him and talk to him to tell him I was back in South Africa and I wanted to do work in a black community and he appointed me as diocese and architect to the Anglican Church, which was a huge opportunity for me and I'm not an Anglican nor do I believe in church or do I believe in any religion. And he thought it was rather funny that he should be appointing someone who at that stage anyhow was professing to be a Marxist-Leninist. But this is a little chapel that I made for him and I worked on a chapel for him and an extension to his house over a 10 year period and the little chapel is only two meters wide. He used it for meditation but what was interesting about it was that we made it with a concrete roof because at that stage he was under threat of bombing. People were throwing handgun heads into his back garden if you can believe it and we wanted to make a safe place for him in his house. But what that led me to do was to do a huge range of church buildings. I did probably 40, 50 churches during that period of time. Many of them very, very simple buildings in really far gone places in the rural areas. But I was one of the first, if not the first architects to in South Africa to work in the black, so-called black African townships. And I found it thrilling. But this is the first building that I ever made in my life and I didn't only design it but I built it with the aid of a local builder and the priest who bought the material and it's a circular church in Djibaba White City in Soweto. And it's a centralized church which I think is interesting because the South African celebration of the mass in the Anglican church is very didactic and very dramatic. And the idea of a centralized church worked very well but what I managed to do was to actually cut the fourth quadrant out of the back of the building and focus it into a huge big courtyard at the back which meant that it could be used for up to 4,000 people at any time. So this is the first building I did and just to say that that concrete slab at the top collapsed once before we got it right. What was very interesting though for me was this idea and it really gets back to political conditions and what kind of work it leads to. This was a project that I did shortly after I finished off the church in 1984 and this was a building that was built by the German government to honor the 1976 Soweto rights and they got a German architect to design it and it was in Germany and it was built by a South African builder in Johannesburg obviously there was this dormitory block over here which if you have a look at the section was I think a really clumsy building. It was a huge waste of space and it wasn't well used but more importantly this was a building that was used by the ANC for returning exiles and MK soldiers who were infiltrating South Africa from the neighboring countries and they needed to triple the accommodation but we had to do it in such a way that we wouldn't bring it to the notice of the local police, soldiers or building inspectors. So what I did was we gutted the inside of the building but kept the roof and then put in a three level building inside of that like this and tripled the accommodation and did it in such a way that no one actually, oh sorry, no one actually realized that much was happening in the building except for a couple of roof lights that sort of sprung up on the building one night on the other side of the building and unfortunately the police didn't see it. So we managed to kind of do something which was very interesting. I think gutter building art, reimagine space, make it much, much more compressed, prefabricate everything and then assemble it on site under the guise of darkness and do it in such a way that no one would catch us doing it. So when people say you have huge restrictions in a city because of building regulations, let me tell you there are plenty of ways of getting around them. This is the inside of the building and I just think this is absolutely fantastic and it was series of chairs that I designed very quickly. They're beautifully made and they're made by a local carpenter literally 50 meters away from the church. So the kind of level of skills that are available in those areas is quite amazing. These are series of prefabricated churches that we built right throughout, I said about 40 or 50 of them and what we did was each church had a different facade. So they were all exactly the same, built like farm sheds but they had different facades and what we did in the offices, we made a plaque to represent the elevation of each church and on the concentration of the church we would then give the church one of these plaques which they then hung up. The inside of the church buildings. As a consequence of all this I got very involved in a whole range of work for NGOs, the Soweto-Korea Center, a whole series of buildings and maybe for me the thing I wanted to say to you now and I know that this is not a correct term because culture can't be neutral but I try to make buildings that were culturally neutral in the sense of I believe that because people were in free and South Africa at that time I couldn't presume to try and make culturally appropriate works and forms for people who didn't have a voice because I think culture grows from the bottom up as much as from the top down. So these were buildings utterly shaped by responding to program, to purpose, to site, to technology and so on but one of the most interesting things was that we did try and make our buildings what we call transparent in the sense that where we could we try to show on the outside of the building, I'm talking now about literally transparent, not all that other kind of stuff that people write about but what we try to do is to make our buildings transparent on the outside in as much as you could read the spatial configuration of the building on the inside on the outside facade of the building. It was just trying to make things familiar to people so they could understand the stuff that we were doing because these were really people who had never been exposed to any form of architecture like this before in their lives. We looked at shack settlements, we tried to build a developed building systems based upon the kind of use of materials and structure and shack settlements and so on and of course, colorful buildings. You know, the tradition of wall murals is very strong in my culture. Another series of buildings that we did planned parenthood buildings, we did about 12 of these. If you can imagine, the township environment is very horizontal. This was an idea we got from Desmond Tutu but he spoke about Nicholas Hawksmore, fantastic British architect who built some wonderful churches in the slums of London, of East London, commissioned by the Anglican church to build tall vertical buildings to bring hope to people and that was Desmond Tutu's idea. So even when we were doing these planned parenthood buildings what we would do is make them brightly colored and we'd try and make them as tall as we could so they would become urban markers in an otherwise undistinguished landscape. We even did work for the pet shop boys. They commissioned us to do about 10 single classrooms like this throughout the rural areas in the Lumpopo area and we built this very, very simple structure which was a double skin roof that could ventilate into spaces in between. Houses also that we built at that time, a house for a doctor, a friend of mine, Theresa and Kamala, a very interesting story. Again, you can see that the facade is transparent. You can read the configuration of the building inside on the outside facade but when I completed the house she fell in love with the minister in Robert MacGarvey's government in Zimbabwe and went to live in Harare. So her nephew took over the house and he was studying medicine at the time at Witt's University and you know what he did. That's what he did. This is really fantastic. He took the house that I designed and he converted it into a dormitory upstairs, a little grocery store in the middle level and a pool table area in the bottom level. In a 100 square meter house and he managed to live as a university student put himself through medicine, at Witt's in six, seven years through the income he earned on this. And it was one of the big lessons for me that for poor people housing is a form of income generation. We've got to create that opportunity for them because a house is much more than just a place they live in. It creates all kinds of opportunities for them. And then towards the end in the late middle 1980s, suddenly the work I was doing in the townships became fashionable in the richer areas of the city. You've heard of the term shak sheik and all that kind of stuff. Well that happened to us and I took advantage of it and I did a series of office buildings and other kinds of buildings using many of the ideas that we developed in the townships and on the rich parts of the city. So this was an occasion when it was from the bottom up that people were building in the rich part of the city in the same way that people were building in the townships and it gave me malicious delight in doing that. What happened then is, so a lot of this work was subversive, a lot of it was undercover, a lot of it was done for people who didn't have a voice at all. And then we had liberation, 1994, new government was elected, the ANC was a fantastic president, Nelson Modella. And I won a competition in 1998 to design a cultural center, a cultural precinct in Port Elizabeth called Red Location. And it's a very interesting place in the sense it's this part of here. It's a very well established part of New Brighton and it had been the home of a number of cultural and political figures and the decision of the city government at that time which I think is fantastic was, we got a problem with our cities, how do we transform our cities? What we do is we build important spaces in the poorest part of the city. So their dream was of the city government of Port Elizabeth to build a cultural precinct with all the facilities you'd associate to the cultural precinct museum, library, art gallery, theaters, et cetera, in a shack settlement. And this is the place that they chose. This is Red Location. Of interest for those who are here who are from England, these are old bungalows that come from a bore concentration camp in Utenhag that was uprooted at the end of the bore and brought to Red Location in Port Elizabeth and black families moved in. For those of you who also don't know it, we like to think that the Nazis invented the concentration camp. They invented its horror, but the British actually did it first in the bore war. And this was the place that we built the museum in. And again, this beautiful local artist who made these fantastic thick, thick, thick paintings of the context that people found themselves in that part of it. Now there are two key ideas here, and this is now after liberation. It's after we're free and we can talk to people and everything is open, is I was interested in typology and how can you find a new typology that can express an idea to people about what constitutes a public building? When I taught at Vitz in the 1980s, I used to do banners and posters for the trade union movement. And this is one of the ones that a couple of friends and I did. And if you notice, and we did this under instruction from trade unionists, you'll find in almost all the trade union posters at that time, is you'll find three building types represented. You double story school, the single story bungler, which is the apartheid house and then the sawtooth roof of the factory. And I believe and I think it was proven when we built the building that the struggle for independence and South Africa freedom was fought largely on the shop floor and that people who were unionized didn't see the factory as a place where they sold their labor, but they rather saw it as a place of civic virtue where the battle was fought and won for their liberation. So for me, the sawtooth roof had hugely symbolic importance and so we decided to use that idea. It's also very good because you get natural light. You can ventilate through the roof and so on. The other idea was, again, an idea that I think is very important in the context of South Africa. How do you make a museum in a post-revolutionary moment? And one of the wonderful things about the ANC and the Eastern Cape is they're very smart. And we talked about it at great length and what they recognized, and this wasn't me doing the talking. It was politicians, very smart politicians. They were saying, we don't want any meta-narratives. We don't want a single history because we know that history will lie. It'll be propaganda. It can't tell the full story. And their reasoning for it was, okay, so the ANC won the war. The ANC won the election. We rule the country now. So we can rewrite the history, but then what happens in 15 or 20 or 30 years time when the ANC loses its place as the top political party in the country is a new political party going to then rewrite that history. And are we gonna go through a process of continually rewriting our histories? They didn't want that. So what we did then was to look at the idea of memory and one of the ideas we then developed was to look at the idea of, sorry, the idea of memory boxes, which are very powerful in Black culture in urban areas where people under apartheid men came to the city to sell their labor, family remained in the rural area. What happened was that the men who lived in horrible barrack-like conditions kept memory boxes under their beds. And those boxes contained ideas of their family, mementos, photographs, whatever it might be. They became very treasured things because it kept them sane for the 11 months every year that they worked in the city, distant from their family. And what happened is these memory boxes became more and more elaborated until they became things like these that you see over here where they become these wonderfully elaborated boxes filled with iconography, in this case religious iconography, the Virgin Mary and various other things. But the idea of a memory box is a very important part of Black culture, particularly urban Black culture. And so the idea of memory and rather than history in any other memory box became a very important part of how to organize the spaces and the story within the museum. Sorry. This is a drawing that I made when I was actually teaching in St. Louis in Washington University, St. Louis. And I was helped by a fantastic graduate student there, Mith Patel, who now works in San Francisco. But really it's trying to do what, someone like Oscar Niemeyer did is, if you've got a big space and you want to make something, what do you do? You make a crossroads because a crossroad is always the first form of intensity when you get two roads crossing. So that's exactly what we proposed. And then we located all the major buildings around it. And one of the other things that I think is very important about South Africa is, and I get really upset with this, is the only true, in my mind, public space is the street. Everything else is controlled. When people talk about, you walk around London and you go through these new kind of developments and they talk about public space, that's absolute nonsense. They're not public, they're controlled. They've got cameras, they're owned by someone other than the public, and you can be excluded at any time. So for me, what we try and work with all the time if we're doing any kind of work that goes beyond the building in South Africa is we work with the idea of the street because I think that's the only democratic space we've got left. And it's contested and it's a problem, but it's a great problem. And then an idea of a model which you can see the cross street, the crossroads, the first building we did was the museum. We then built the art gallery and the library archive and we're now building a big theater and we're building 250 odd houses around it. The buildings as they are now and I'll just quickly show you the museum. So the museum is structured around the idea of 12 memory boxes, huge pieces, 12 meters tall, six by six, six meters by six meters and each one contained within it a kind of idea that was built around the theme of struggle where there was women in struggle, children in struggle, whatever it might be, and they weren't marked and in fact, you never knew what was contained in each one and you made your way in but you made your way to them in an irregular pattern. You didn't have to follow any predetermined path. I had that idea of you come in, you've got entrance, you move through, you have elation, joy, despair and then you walk out, you have a latte, you buy a museum book and then you go back to your next adventure. But in a sense what we tried to do here was to create the memory box which contained the idea of the memory, the theme built around the memory and then what you could say that maybe outside the building was present time but the most important space was the space in between the boxes, which for us was a space of reflection as you moved from one box to another but it was also, there's a fantastic man called Andreas Hasen who wrote a piece about the twilight of memory, about that passing of something that has happened, it slips from memory from the present into the past, it's a kind of twilight period and so this space became a very, very important space for us in the museum. At the building itself, as you can see, this is a shack that, not a shack, one of the old buildings that we kept and through a lot of hard work we managed to get it declared a national monument because it's historical importance, it's over a hundred years old and we've actually looked after it and preserved it and it's made it a major part of some of the other work. And then the one facade of the building that faces onto the real public street is very, I think we did a good job of scaling it in such a way that although it's a big building it brings the scale down to something that is more appropriate in terms of the housing that sits across the road. And then the space inside where the memory box is on and this space took a lot of time to get right because we really worked harder trying to get the light right so it's a heavy gray light, you walk in and you feel the weight of the light on you. So it's not a happy light, it's a weighty light, you can feel it, it's almost viscous. The next building that we did was the art gallery and just, I think a very simple art gallery but offers all sorts of other opportunities. The only art gallery in any black township in South Africa. And again, this idea of the street, the importance of the street, the edge of the street and the idea that wherever you get the opportunity you try and animate that edge, you try and create opportunities for people to meet and talk and sit. And we don't privilege the car, but we allow the car in and what we do in a case like this is we take the same road surface all the way through and we don't have a curb and tarmac and then some other kind of cobblestones or one single surface. And let me tell you, no one's got killed there yet and the building under its different conditions. And then in the crook of the space, of the L-shaped space, we kept in its original position one of the original bungalows, if you wanna call it that, from the bore concentration camp. And what we did is we didn't, I know that you've got a preservation program here at Columbia, we didn't try and restore it at all. We just left it as it is. And what we've done is we've contracted one of the families who lived in a similar kind of house to that to come and look after it every month or so. And when something falls off, they get a piece of, like they would have done in the past, they get a piece of plastic, a plastic bag or something and they stuff it into a hole to prevent the water from coming in and then it sags a little bit and it sags a little bit more and they prop it up with an old piece of wood that they can find. And that's how it lives. And we don't know what's gonna be like in 20 years time. It might have dissolved, I don't know. But we certainly didn't want to restore it because I think that would have destroyed the power that it has as a space that people lived in. And we also photograph it every three months. So we've got this continual record of its condition. And then the interior of the art gallery, which is art gallery, South Light, none of these buildings are air conditioned and always the idea of a connection between the building and the outside space, this big community window. So people walking past can look in and you can look out. The library which is over here and I think this is quite an interesting space in the sense that it's the first proper digital library that we've got in South Africa, not in a black area. But what for me was most interesting is that we built an archive here. There's a proper archive there and an archive reading room and these archives are designed to accommodate the history of struggle in the Eastern Cape. So what you'll get, which I think is very nice, is scholars, academics and students and others walking through a really righteous library space full of township kids, playing on computers and stuff like that and on their way to this very serious space at the back. So this idea of transformation is possible, that people come, they brush shoulders with each other. Sometimes in ways that they wouldn't normally do or they wouldn't normally like, but they have to do it. And then the building itself, if you know materials or ubiquitous materials found in the area, for example, in this case over here, that is the same kind of boarding that people build their houses out of that come from the plywood packing cases that come from the motor car factories in Port Elizabeth, which people then take the packing cases and build houses from. This is a really powerful piece of work and it went on the 2012 Venice Biennale and it's a reworking of Picasso's Guernica. It's nine meters long and it's three and a half meters high. Stunned by local women, they saw Guernica and they felt the power of Guernica, but in this case, they're not angry about the bombing of a town by Franco's forces in the 1930s. They're now angry about AIDS because it's at the heart of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa. And if you have a look, you could actually see that, sorry, at the bottom over here are a series of little tin plaques, tin pieces and written on each one of them as the name of a woman who date of birth and who date of death from AIDS. And if you have a look, even some of the figures have been adjusted, you know, there are clearly women over here and so on. It's a very, very beautiful piece and we put that on exhibition Venice and I did a drawing, a hand drawing map that Hilary spoke about, which was the same size as this tapestry and my idea was to say that in a way like this is a narrative, it's telling you a story about something, a plan does exactly the same thing. And I'm really appalled and shocked that, you know, we treat plans so appallingly when we draw them nowadays because they're just simply drawn as diagrams, sterile diagrams that tell nothing other than the fact that there's a certain amount of stuff that's distributed, you know, on a piece of paper. So I'm really keen on this idea of the plan being a very, very important part of to always remember that it's a horizontal section through a building. So it has space attached to it, which no one seems to be dealing with today. And then the interior of the library which is now filled with computers but they're not in use because the building, these buildings have been captured by the local people, they've closed the buildings down but they're looking after them until some other political issues are dealt with. And then the reading room of the library, the archive reading room, which we really try to make into a special space and very, very controlled light and very, very small windows and there's the light coming in through the top so it's a well insulated space. And I think it'll be a special place for people to come and to escape the hubbub of township life and find a bit of peace and quiet. And then some housing that we've been involved in and this is, if I go back, I'm sorry, this is part of the big plan that Terry was talking about that went on exhibition but if you have a look over here, this is the museum, the art gallery and the library and this is where we're building the housing. And what we did with the housing was two things. First of all, sorry, if I go back here, if you have a look at these subdivisions, these are what the government is building at the moment, 250 square meter sites with a 48 square meter house in the middle of it. We reduced the size to 90 square meters with a 48 square meter house on it as well but double storied. And that was simply done because we wanted everyone who lived there to have a house in the place because I think they'll be valuable in the future. And the space that we captured in the middle is now put over to productive use and each homeowner will have an allotment but what I do a lot of and I think it's important maybe for your students to think about is a bare bones plan which really shows precisely what we're going to offer people what will be built for them but then imagining, and I mean I'm not suggesting that this is what we want to have happen but imagining the best case scenario what it might turn out like in 20, 30, 40 years time and to be able to draw that just as an imaginary and I find that hugely satisfying because in a sense you can contest some of your ideas by drawing it in a different kind of way and then you actually find it doesn't really matter. Why do you get worried about whether someone does something to your building because it actually in the long term doesn't matter that much. And then again that idea of this is what we built what we've also done is squeezed the road down to very, very tight space one single material sidewalk and road so that the road becomes like an outdoor living room bringing the house to the front you can then build whatever you want in the backyard and then if you provide access from the front from the front yard to the backyard you can rent out that space you can have a factory you can do anything you want but you can use the housing to generate income which is really important for poor people. And what you can see here is the housing as we get to build it but the idea is always that you get these routes through the house from the front right to the back. The other thing is that the city who provide money for the housing don't like building people building shacks you know next to their houses because that's what people do they move from a shack settlement, get a house the first thing they do is build a shack in the backyard and the city doesn't like that because that sort of spoils the dream when the minister of housing drives past or she drives past in a chauffeur-driven car they get upset. So what we did was quite clearly I think built this wall which means that you can do whatever you want behind and it can be thoroughly illegal it doesn't matter but no one ever sees it so it's invisible and if it's invisible no one can see it the building inspectors don't mind the only things they worry about is what they can see it's another good lesson for you to remember. I'm now going to quickly talk about work that we've been doing in Cape Town for the last 15 years or so just to give you an idea of some of the projects the most beautiful city in the world it was occupied by the Dutch at the same time as New York so we kind of got the same in colonial terms same sort of time span for growth although you must understand that the perspective that we have in South Africa of who came first is driven by Western European and particularly Dutch Calvinist interests the Portuguese were here well before and then before the Portuguese were the Japanese and then even before they were the Chinese so it goes back to the 11th, 10th century so but the first settlement that we know of was created by the Dutch 1652 it's a big metropolitan area of maybe four and a half million people but small settlements clustered around this gigantic big mountain I'm again using artwork I'm interested in the representation of the city that I now live in today over the time I mean this is fantastic drawing of a kind of very civilized city also made by an English artist and then the modernist vision this was done by Kurt Jonas one of our best modern architects a friend of Rex Martinsen in 1934 imagining Cape Town as a city of slab blocks I mean can you believe if that had been built? Needless I have to say is Kurt was a really good Bolshevik and then Cape Town is a mini Hong Kong which I don't think will happen because I don't think it's possible to do it because of the landscape but then what Cape Town is now a sleazy multinational international tourist destination where everyone is either a waiter or a chef or a barista or a whore that's kind of like the kind of way in which we live in the world today and the service industry that's gripped us but this is a kind of interesting image in the sense that that's where the tourists are and everything is for rent and we can even build things on the top of Table Mountain but that's where the people live to actually service that kind of wonderful entertainment area but this for me is what tells the story of our city and it's really an analysis of wealth, density and energy consumption and as you can see, you know, the wealthiest people live at the lowest density, okay and they use the greatest energy and I'm sure that that probably works in your country as well but it's much more marked in our country because we have some of the highest levels of inequality in the world in South Africa and so we got involved in a project this is the place where the urban poor live and Cape Town is Table Mountain in the background. I live in a place called Hart Bay and my wife and I made a decision that we weren't going to live in a gated society so we live in an area which is right adjacent to a shack settlement and you have to actually drive through the shack settlement to get to our home and we're quite happy with it because I think if I'm going to be a citizen of my city I need to live in a place where I can feel and understand what people are doing and saying. This was taken about four days ago from the pages, front pages of our national newspaper and it's about Hart Bay. We had rights in Hamburg, which is where I live about the fishing quotas because there's been some corruption to do with the fishing quotas but this is Hart Bay, it's the most beautiful place Table Mountain is up there this is the social housing area and we live in that part of it over there and as you can see from the photographs it's magical. I mean, the people who are not very rich who the poor people who live here have got the power of the gaze. I mean, they can possess that landscape just because of the position that they enjoy in that landscape. This is the view that they have towards the city, it's quite magical and this is how they live and how they build but we were asked by the Maxi Museum in Rome, Pippo Chura, who's the curator and he got a whole bunch of architects together and he asked us to have a look at a range of ideas about housing and what we did is we said, okay, we're going to look at how we can make Hungberg, the place that I've been talking about now, energy efficient and how we can make it in a sense independent of the city grid and what we proposed was the idea that when you build and bring services into shack settlements, you destroy most of those shacks and the result of that is that 40% of the houses need to be rebuilt and we said, well, that's no good because we don't have the money to do it but we said that the best service and the cheapest service to get to any of these areas is electricity and the reason for that is it's all above ground and it has only one point of connection to the ground and we said, okay, building on that idea, let's imagine another way of how it is that we can actually bring resources, collect rainwater, generate energy, recycle and so on using this principle of one point of connection to the ground and what we developed was this idea of the energy tree. It's like a machine, it's shaped like a tree but it's actually a machine because what it does do is it captures rainwater on the canopy, you can grow things up there, the water's brought through, it can then be filtered. What you also do is we've got methane gas generated a little bit off the site and positioned further away but it can be brought back here very simple flexible parts. So you've got a water point, you've got a food point and you've also got a power point, all happening at this one point so it also becomes a social point of contact and then if you pile that into a much bigger structure it really is like growing trees. You get, you know, instead of deciduous trees you now get 12 month a year trees, get fantastic shape but you can actually see how you can actually insert these trees into that space and it can do all kinds of things. So what we then did is said, okay, let's take an aerial view of the area and we called in a friend of ours who's a landscape architect to ask him to imagine how he would plant trees in the area and he did that and then what we did is we took those tree positions and we simply put our energy trees in position where the trees would have gone. So instead of planting trees, we're going to make trees and we're gonna put the trees on the site and they can do all kinds of jobs. And we've been commissioned by the city, this is not real, you probably see that it's a render, but we're doing two experimental trees now in a peri-urban area in Cape Town and we're going to test the data over three year period and see whether they can in fact work. How are we doing? All right, you give me a yell when I've talked to zone. The other thing that I think is interesting about Cape Town is this idea of formal settlements and then the way in which informal settlements bang up against them and we were invited by the Herr Hassen Foundation or Society in Berlin to take part in an urban exchanger program with the LEC a couple of years ago and we decided to take a look at the problem of housing in these kinds of areas. If you look at the area that we chose, this is the beginning of 2012, four months later and 18 months later, that's how quick the development happens. It almost happens, you can't believe it. So what we did is we developed the idea of a tablehouse and you can see over there a reference to Adams House and Paradise, but it's a very basic archetypal structure which because people don't have the technical knowledge to be able to build double storied houses on the site and because density is increasing all the time, we need to release green space, we said let's build the minimum structure that we can build that you can put over a shack and then you can take the shack, put it on top and build a formal house below. So this was the strategy. With four columns, precast concrete slab, you move your shack on the top and then you build a permanent house underneath. You can now go up four stories in this way. And it looks easy, but it was actually very difficult because we had to do it all so cheaply and it had to be able to be built very simply. And then we developed two scenarios. The first one was individual houses growing up vertically which means that over time, you can probably release enough land to start creating proper green space, which you can use for cultivation. And then the other option was to build grouped social housing where you actually share common walls with people. The first one that we built, we built it in two days of construction but it took seven days because we had a lot of concrete to set and it cost the equivalent of just over 500 US dollars. Yeah, that's right. And it was built by this team of men over here who run a social business in the area called Hands of Honor and this is the lucky recipient. And then that's what she did. Within a week, bang, it was on the top. But you know what they did which really upset us is they used the button to park their car. It was extraordinary. They made a garage out of it. So that was really upsetting but we couldn't do anything about it because that's what they chose to do. But we're now building a whole lot more of these table houses and as I said before, they can go up to three, four stories so we're testing that as well. But I just thought I'd give you this idea. This is the kind of range of housing costs that you have to face in South Africa. It should be 500 US dollars but that's what a little table house costs. A shack costs 280 US dollars. RDP house costs 11,200. And then those kind of houses that we get in the rich areas of our city, 375,000 dollars. So you could build, what's it? 375,000 houses for a mean little apartment on the Atlantic. I know what I would do. And then a series of these tiny little houses that I was telling you about that we've done which are all small houses, less than 150 square meters, usually for friends and others but we do a lot of them all the time and we use them to experiment with ideas. Including now we're building a whole lot of vaults but we're not doing that parabolic vault that everyone else is doing, I promise you. And a very interesting house that we built recently which is for a guy who's got one of the world's best collections of Coca-Cola and memorabilia and it was built on an existing house. There was an existing house over here and we had to add another floor onto it and the big floor upstairs with the beginnings of a Coca-Cola museum. So we might sound serious and we might sound like we're real serious committed Marxist learners but we do have fun and we've got really cool friends. And this is again a tiny house but again, this is an expensive house. I mean, we don't have a problem of doing expensive houses. This cost a huge amount of money to build. I don't have a problem with that but it's still 150 square meters and this is an interesting house because it's cast in concrete, it's cast in white concrete which I think if you had to try and do it in America it would be probably very different, difficult you can do it in South Africa where labor's very cheap and we have a big sliding roof at the back so those big fins that stick out at the back are there to support the sliding roof that slides out towards the back when the weather is good and all in cast in place, white concrete which I think is something that you wouldn't normally find anywhere else in the world but you can do it in South Africa. And a series of schools, I'm going to go through these quickly but a series of projects that we do all the time which again are small projects where we do small insurgences in buildings. The reason why I showed you this was how do you make a space that is designed for no purpose and that's really difficult because I've always believed that architecture's brought into being in order to satisfy purpose and it's in the satisfaction of purpose that lies its ethical dimension. And yet here we made these circular spaces for no purpose other than that they were given over to the kids and they can do what they wanted with them. Other spaces we build lots of models and again another building that was done with no purpose in mind other than the fact that it had a satisfied 20 different uses and it's a circular building with a square contained inside of it. Buildings that donson between trees and then a place to collect kids which becomes an outdoor classroom. So we're interested in geometry, we're interested in purpose and we're interested in multi-purpose uses. We are a great supporter of some of the works of some of the ideas of Aldo Rossi particularly his idea that those buildings that show the greatest potential for adaptability over time are those that are marked by the most extreme geometric precision. So the kind of weak geometries that you find architects use today are utterly I think incapable of being able to be adjusted to new uses over time. So I think that they're unsustainable. The landscape is really important in Cape Town and this was a kind of case that demonstrates it. We've just completed this building in our large courtyard with fantastic views of Table Mountain and the school wanted to build the two wings of single story classrooms and they wanted to build another story of classrooms on either side of the courtyard. Now if they'd done that they would have destroyed the view of the mountain from the courtyard. And we said you can't do it and they said well there's no other way to do it. So we said no there is. What you do is you put the classrooms on the ground and then you take the courtyard and you bend it. You put it over the top of the building and that's what you do. So if you imagine instead of the existing classrooms are over there instead of putting another story up there you put the classrooms next to the existing ones you create a street in between and then you do that with the roof and you make a green space which becomes now a courtyard space that the kids can use. It's a fantastic space because it's inclined and you still get the view of the mountain. So you can do something sexy but it can actually lie in nice hard headed rational thought with a good outcome and the classrooms. Very quickly a project that we just completed now but it's a museum for fossils outside Cape Town. I'm trying to give you a range of work that we're doing. We're doing work now for a whole range of this is for the government. We do work for the government. We do work for private individuals for all sorts but it's quite interesting in the sense that I'm not gonna talk about this because I'm worried about time but I want to just quickly go through the building to tell you that for me this is probably one of the best things we've ever done in the sense that it's the ideal museum because you enter at the top because it's on a steeply sloping site and you can cut it in because this is old mine sand. You enter at the top and you circulate around you drop down into the big exhibition space then you drop down into the basement you exit at the bottom and you go towards the dig site. So you never retrace your steps which I think is a real improvement for us. And then even though we live in South Africa we have a look at Baroque architecture we try and figure out how you go around a corner in a building rather than make it a sharp corner and then this building which sits in that landscape in that way. Fantastic artists, local artists who worked on the building and this for me is one of the nicest pieces. This is a work done by a local artist which is to make a life-size full-scale replica of the civetia which was in this place five million years ago but out of all pieces of wood. And it's not life like at all but yet it really tells you what the animal was like. It's I think quite beautiful. So we have unbelievable talent and artistry in these areas and then the building in its landscape which gives you a sense of how it fits and then the actual dig site itself we're building a new cover for it these are five million year old fossils probably one of the four greatest fossil finds in the world. It's a national heritage site it'll be a world heritage site soon. I'm getting near the end. One of the things that I'm most interested about is a project that is going to be built next year and that is in the middle of Johannesburg we're building an apartment building that is the first apartment building to be built in downtown Johannesburg in the last 40 years and that's because things are starting to take shape in Johannesburg and although people are rehabilitating all buildings known as building new buildings and this is a new one. And it's a 14 story, 12 story building. It's a complicated building to do because we have all sorts of height limits and sight lines and stuff that we have to contend with but what really excites me about the building is the fact that it's a building in which we have a range of accommodation from 22 square meter small studios all the way up to 100 square meter penthouse. It's a building that's got seven different apartment types in it and the cost starts in U.S. terms at $25,000 and they go right up to $180,000, $200,000. So it's like building a cross section of a building in the city where you have a range of different types that are offered to people from tiny space to bigger space, family space to single person space and the building in its context and we're looking at different ways of treating the facade. This is now with a flat top rather than and what it looks like in the city at night time. And then finally to end off because I come back to what we started off with my first building was a church and my last building is now also a church and it's also a circular church but what's interesting about it and I tell you the story because it's one of the advantages of being a teacher. I taught the priest in this church, I taught him, he was an architectural student at Vitz in the 1980s. The best student we probably had at Vitz in 10 years and he practiced for three years and then became a minister in the Anglican church, a priest in the Anglican church and then contacted me five years ago and asked me to make a church for him which was fantastic and we've had great fun. But this is a church, I've shown the St. Paul's church over there together with the new church and really it's a much more sophisticated reading of a church now that I've got more experience and I can actually deal with these things in a better way but it's a church that offers both small and big space and it offers a full range of uses. So it's the full circle. What I want to say to you is that my lesson and these are the few of the things I wanted to talk about and I don't think I have much time to talk about it. I don't think revolution is anything to do with good architecture. We had a revolution in my country. The architecture that we do after the revolution is probably a little bit worse than it was before. Nothing's really improved. We had the most fantastic opportunity in South Africa to re-describe building types, come up with new ways of thinking about how to make space, new ways of transforming the city, nothing happened. So what is the role of the architect? And my sense is that we've got no role. We're not politicians. We can't change things in society and we can't even change it through the work we do. If we're lucky, we might be able to change it a little bit but most times we don't change it at all but what we've got to do is we've got to make good architecture. And for me, the thing that we don't do enough of is we don't do enough of making good architecture. We just don't do it well enough. And what we have to do is get back to that thing that we can do best which is to make architecture and make good architecture. I think then we might start to have some kind of impact. Thank you. Just give everybody a minute to make this is on. Can you guys, can you hear me? Great, well thank you so much. It's a fantastic talk. And no, probably people will be eager to ask you some questions. I'm happy. So I don't know if we, just maybe a few things. I think I, there's so many things I'd love to talk to you more about and a range of things from just even your start and looking through your work. I know also there were some competitions on housing in the beginning. So I mean it seems to me that while you present the work that you did with Desmond Tutu and the Anglican Church I think there's also, it seems to me also because I'm teaching housing this semester so everyone knows that I'm very interested in that and returned to that often. But that it's also been a part of your work from the beginning and your thinking. And I think that certainly frames your attitudes about the world, about architecture and that maybe it's also no coincidence then you talk a lot about this idea of what is public, what is public space, the street, how important that is. I got a sense through your work also. It's very obviously thoughtful but also you seem to stay true to all of these ideas through everything you make, buildings, but drawings, even some of the, there's a recent film online that there was no talking, no subtitles, just people walking in the buildings which I thought was very interesting. So again returning to that. Ideas of I think representation in the city. And I really appreciate your comments about that. I mean maybe we could talk a little bit about those terms because I think just your last comments about what can we do as architects and to do those things really well. It's building but I think also for young people and particularly in the U.S. it is very difficult to start a practice and have opportunities. And one of those things we can do really well is represent things and draw. Yeah. I mean I would be curious to hear a little more about your thoughts around that and maybe how you spend your day. I mean it seems as though obviously you spend time, you draw, but you also seem to walk, you must. No, look, there's a couple of things. I mean I taught at Witt's University with Pancho Geddes that I think anyone who's interested in the art of Africa and architecture of Africa should look at. But it comes out of a tradition that I think is an unusual one and that is that I make drawings because so many times I get disappointed by what gets built. And so I make a drawing sometimes just to remind myself how nice the idea was because in fact the drawing is the perfect representation of the idea. When you make that drawing and you put a lot of effort into it and you get it just right, it doesn't matter what happens, you've got that idea and I think that's very important. The other thing that I also do a lot of is that I redraw and redraw. Sometimes 20 years after I've made a building I redraw it and just change it with the knowledge that I now have and change it so that it becomes perfect and I think that's part of research. It's part of what we're supposed to do but we never talk about it. One of the things that we do also in the office you saw those wooden models that we've made, we make tons of them, we've got a whole bloody warehouse full of them but what we do with those models is most times those models are made after we've done the building, you know that. And what we do is we build the building and then we build the model of what we've built and we build it to understand even more clearly what it is that we've done. And one of the things that I love about building wooden models is that when you build a wooden model you can't put any detail in it. So what you have to do is you have to strategically think about how to represent this thing that you've made in a very, very simple way which for me is what we look for all the time because I hate this idea of God is in the details. The detail is everything. It just seems to me today that what people do is they do a diagram and they slap every kind of new material and stuff into the book. Okay, that's all right. I wave my hands a lot, sir. They slap all kinds of things onto the building and suddenly you've got a presto architecture and I was taught in England in the late 70s. I spent some time at the A as well and one of the lessons I got was from Alison Smithson who spoke beautifully about the idea of, no, don't worry, it'll dry out in no time at all. Thank you. It's not wine. It would be nice if it was, but still. But was, you know, a proper detail, if you can imagine it, would be something that maybe in a thousand years' time, after a thousand years after the building was built, an archeologist excavating the site where the building was might find one detail of the building and that one detail could tell that person the whole architecture of the building. Can you imagine that? Now what will we pick up today? We'll pick up an aluminium cover strip, okay, which would be the architecture of our buildings. So what she was really saying is that the architecture, the detail is the architecture. It's a fundamental part of it and it represents the total idea of the building. So when we build our wooden models after we've built the building, we rethink how are we gonna build the model and how are we gonna represent the bits and pieces of the building in a much more simplified way and that actually helps us understand how we can do it even better next time. So it's all for ourselves. I mean, it's a very selfish pursuit. It costs money, but again, another anecdote, but an essay that I read recently, there's a very good practice in Germany and I'll call it Saarbruch and Hutton, you probably know them. And both people went to the AA and when they graduated, Matai Saarbruch went to work for OMA and his wife Laura Hutton went to work for the Smithsons. And she talks about it, that they worked for two years in these separate practices and then they got together and we're talking about. You know that in the two years, her husband worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week, doing millions and millions of models and this, that and the other. She worked eight till five. They had lunch, no work on weekends. She achieved more working for the Smithsons during that period than her husband did. So you can actually do great work. You don't have to kill yourself. You can have a social life. You can have a family. You can have children. You can do wonderful things and it's not a problem. So what am I trying to say? I'm trying to say it's not that difficult. It's just you've got to try your best and it's not measured in terms of how much sleep you don't have. It's measured in terms of how much thought you put into it. Thought is difficult. If you get that right, you can work eight hours a day and make really nice work. That's great. Let's go to pass. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I'm just talking, you know. Any questions? Yeah. Is there anyone from Africa here? No. Oh, Lecker. Good. Where from? Oh, yes. How's that? Cape Town students. Yes. Great. Yeah. Hello. Thank you. That was very informative and inspiring lecture. Thank you for that. I was very interested in the idea that the way you put it is housing is a form of income generation. Yeah. And I was wondering if you have any ideas or thoughts on how that could be applied in different parts of the world. For instance, in the US, like with all these regulations and zoning and the Kino codes, if you have any ideas today. I've no idea. I mean, the US is a different place from anywhere else on the planet. I mean, you could be in Mars. You know, I mean, you really are different. But I mean, one of the most interesting things about housing is this idea that housing needs contract and expand over the life of a family. And I think in the US, what you've done in the past is you move. You move from small to big, from big to small and then to a retirement home or whatever. Well, in other parts of the world, you don't have that ability because you're constrained by income potential. But I think it's gonna happen here soon that it's not gonna be possible to be able to do that. And so the question is, how do you make houses that can accommodate a large family when the family leave? How can you then transform that house into something that you can Airbnb, you can rent, you can do whatever you want? I think that's an important consideration. It really is. And it's a traditional one, you know? You know, I studied under John Turner in England and you know, there was a maxim that he introduced to us and that is that never describe a house in terms of what it is because that's what we tend to do as architects. We always talk about what it is. Rather talk about what it can do in terms of people's lives, you know? And I think that idea of income is very important. I just wanted to say with the Cape Town students here that, you know, Hillary spoke about me, you know, being a tenured professor and running a practice, but I had a name at UCT, which was my surname is no arrow, but I was called Professor Nowhere because of my absence from the school whilst I was doing site supervision and dealing with architectural matters. It's a very difficult job to both teach and practice at the same time as I'm sure your teachers understand. Any other questions? I'm sure there's, yeah, we have one. Thank you very much. I was intrigued by your tree. Is there a possibility that the tree might be solar powered and not totally off the grid, per se? It could be. I mean, what we're looking at at the moment is using it for cultivation on the top, but we have a big problem in Cape Town, which is that we have very strong winds because we're in a rut at the tip of Africa. And if you're in an exposed part of the city, which is where the urban poor are, you know, I don't think we can support plant life on the top of the tree, you know, to get stripped to no time at all. So we're looking at other uses for it and that could possibly be that. But that idea of, you know, the energy tree is, I don't think it's something that's entirely original. I think lots of people have tried it, but I think it's such an important idea that, you know, you can have all the benefits of a tree, it can even breathe because you grow things on the top of it. But at the same time, it can do all these other things which I think is quite, but we'll take note of it. And when I go back, we'll have a look at it. Thank you. Questions? Maybe I can talk to you about that housing that we do. I mean, you know. Yeah, that sounds good. In South Africa, as part of restitution, as part of making good our history of racial exploitation, our government has a housing policy which is dictated by our new constitution, which is that everyone shall have the right to decent shelter. So the government has embarked upon a housing program which is to build every family who can't afford a house, a house in South Africa. Like you can imagine, that's a hell of a task. And they've built three and a half million houses in the last 20 years, which is a huge number of houses. I don't think the US builds that amount. But these are houses that are given to people for nothing. You qualify, you get the house, and you go. The problem is that it's a one-dimensional approach to housing because first of all, you can't, I mean, every family's housing needs are unique. And you can't satisfy the housing program by building every family a 48 square meter house because you have big family, small families, and so on. And also because you have to build the housing cheaply, you need large pieces of ground which you usually find only outside the city. So you get big contractors involved. They work at a huge economies of scale. They need big pieces of ground. So you build all these houses outside of the city far from work opportunities. So we built three and a half million houses and most of them were disasters. We find that in some cases, for example, where the houses are built close to shack settlement, a family, for example, we did some research recently, a family will get an RDP house from the government. Now they've obliged in terms of the law to live in the house for nine years before they can sell it. But of course there are ways of selling it. So what they do is after six months, they will, someone will knock on their door with a suitcase full of cash and offered to buy the house from them and they're only too happy to take the cash and leave. What then happens and these people are usually people from outside South Africa, from West Africa who've got huge urban experience, much more so than South Africans because of our history, they knock the house down. And then they build a single, a double story pancake building right over the site, two floors, 10 rooms per floor with a little bathroom kitchen at the end. And then they sell, they rent those rooms out for a huge amount of money every month. So, you know, my tax money goes into building a house on a piece of ground that the government gives to an ED family who then sell it onto someone and within a year, a year and a half the house is knocked down and something new is built on its place. Which shows you the impossibility of getting the state involved in the design and management of housing. I'm not saying that I'm advocating a free enterprise approach where, you know, everyone's left to their own devices. State's job is there to make sure there's justice and to ensure that there's equality, redistribution of resources and everything. State must get out of trying to provide houses because it's a disaster when they do it. And I'm not sure what the experience in the US is, but I mean, I lived in St. Louis for five years and the housing problems in St. Louis are disastrous. The kind of state federal housing that was built in the 60s, 70s is unbelievably, unimaginatively bad. So I don't know how you would manage it in the US, but you certainly need to give control of a housing to local people and local organizations, but they need to be given access to the resources that they need to build. Now, what's very nice is, I mean, a country like Brazil, for example, in Sao Paulo, they have a friend who's just come back from there was telling me that they have a program that they've been running for some time now where the people for whom the housing is intended are given the freedom to choose the kind of architects and other people that they want to work with so that they have the confidence of knowing that they've selected the professional team so they can talk to that team and they can express their fears and the things that they want rather than having someone forced upon them. Galea, yeah. Thank you very much for your lecture. Thank you. Beautiful work and all the explanations are very interesting. I wanted to ask you about your final statement that an architect should now concentrate on doing the best architecture they can possibly do. And I think that in the many aspects of life, I'm coming to the realization that there cannot be one mandate for anyone so that I think that one of the ways in which I see your work as an educator, an architect, a politician, one of the things that we may do as architects together is to take different tracks. Some of us can do the best architecture we can do, some of us can do the best writing that they can do and some of them can be politicians because I do think that there would be a really good result from most, some of us are actually not leaving all the political work to lawyers, which is the majority. So have you, do you see, are there any colleagues that you have that are working on the policy aspects of architecture or the political aspects of architecture? No, I absolutely agree with you. I'm talking about, maybe, I have a number of friends and some of the students, some of the ex-students in the audience here from UCT will bear this out, we have quite a number of our graduates now who are moving into local government and working in housing, in health and in education and actually finding it really fulfilling because although they're not making drawings or they're not designing buildings, they're actually manifestly changing the kind of direction of policy. So maybe the point I was trying to make is just that I think that there are two principles that I think if you want to make buildings as opposed to doing all these other things, that are important. I think the first one is not to confuse architectural practice with active citizenship. Active citizenship, you join a political party, you join, you march under the flag and you change things but don't think architecture can do that. And then the other point that I think is really fundamentally important is that if you take the idea that architecture is brought into being in order to satisfy purpose because without purpose you can't have architecture. Yeah, it's empty of meaning. Then we've got to accept that that purpose carries within it an ethical dimension. And so our work is ethical and the ethics in our work lie in the contractual relationship that we set up between ourselves and the people who sponsor our work. And we don't do enough of that. We should start saying to the people who ask us to do things we're not prepared to do it simply because we don't believe in it. And stop the idea that if you don't do the job someone else is gonna do it, is not gonna do it as well as you can or too bad, just don't do it. If you want to be ethical, if you don't wanna be ethical, I mean, I'm sick and tired of hearing these huge mega stars say, oh, I didn't really wanna do the building but we had to make the best job we could a little bit embarrassed, but I mean, after all, we did it. You know, bullshit, you know, you did it. And you took that decision, you gotta live with it. And I think you've all gotta make that decision for yourself and you make it in different kinds of ways. I mean, for example, in our practice, I'm sick and tired of saying, people say, will you please come in? We'd like to interview you for a job. And I think, you know, there I am, 60 or 65-odd years old and scrutinizing me as if I'm some kind of specimen and they want to check whether I'm okay for the job or whether I've got the insurance policies and whether, you know, I've got the competence in my practice and I go and I say, fine. And when it's finished, I say, no, I want to interview you. I want you to show me your bank account. Can you afford to build this building? How much profit are you gonna make? What are you gonna do about the people who work in your company? Are you gonna consult them when you make this building? Are you gonna talk to the people who clean the windows in your new building and the security guards and others? And sometimes they get mad, out, go, you know? Most times, but every now and then you catch someone and they say, you know, okay, let's talk. And they suddenly understand that this is a relationship. It's not a master-servant relationship between an architect and a client. This business about architecture being an industry is bullshit. It really is, it's not an industry. It's a noble profession, okay? It's a discipline and we've got to recover it. And if we don't, we're finished because there gotta be plenty of other people who can do it probably better than we can in the marketplace in terms of efficiency, speed of delivery, and the set and the other. So we've gotta put up a fight and I think it's gotta start sometime and it should be up to you guys to do it. Do you agree? Does that make sense? Yeah, it's humiliating, yeah? The interview process, it's validated by all of us just accepting it. Now, do I do interviews? Of course I do. But I think your basic point is, can, should architects assert more of the power they have? And I would say, of course, and there's a multiplicity of tasks that we do. The comparison that comes to mind is like, you know, when you're a parent, you also decide certain things that you can get done right and certain things that you cannot. And the acknowledgement of limited power as architects, it's also a way of moving forward. Yeah, I agree. But I think we construct those limits ourselves. And I think there's a good chance that we can pull them apart. I mean, I really, I know it sounds crazy, but I think we're gonna set a fashion in Cape Town for small houses, for rich people. Because all of a sudden people are saying, hey, this is not a bad idea. Now, I must admit, I don't give them the story I gave you tonight, that, you know, we've gotta build small houses for rich because we need maximum rather than minimum standards. We talk about other things like sustainability and stuff like that. But I think you can actually change it. And you just need one or two opportunities and then if you can do it well, suddenly other people see it and then they do it. So I think we've just gotta try a little bit more. That's what I'm saying, you know? And I'm talking specifically about if you want to be an architect, making drawing buildings, you know, making architecture, going to site supervising construction. The other routes that you're talking about, absolutely, I couldn't agree more with you. All right. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure. Thank you.