School of Architecture,planning and Housing

The "parapet" or "lean-to" house is a flat roofed structure ubiquitous to many parts of the southern African interior. It has been associated, over the past two centuries, with a wide range of urban as well as rural environments. In the process it has also gained for itself a variety of names, having been identified, at various times, as the preferred residential form of Malay immigrants, Griqua cattle herders and Dutch farmers. More recently its use has also spread to indigenous architecture, to such an extent that it has also become identified with the Southern African highveld, becoming known locally as a "bafokona" dwelling. Yet this nomenclature is usually incorrect and highly misleading. For one thing it is based upon a number of wide generalizations and stereotypical group images which have prevailed at one time or another during this country's history. For another, the implications of being a "style" of construction deny both the economic processes which give rise to it and the historical patterns which link this structure to a Cape and, ultimately, a wider European architectural tradition. This paper traces the origins of the flat-roofed dwelling in southern Africa and examines the social and economic processes which have facilitated its transmission and incorporation into the larger body of indigenous built forms. It also documents the changes and adaptations which take place when the dwelling forms and technologies of one culture are adopted by another.

Change and the inevitability of change is one of the givens of human society, yet it remains one of the most difficult and most painful processes known to us. Whether it is brought about by the introduction of new ideas, new practices, or new technologies, the need to meet changing social or environmental conditions is constantly with us and, it may be argued, is as inescapable as death and taxes. Despite the fact that many changes are not revolutionary in nature, but are merely the result of an evolution of ideas whose time has come, acceptance is seldom immediate, it is usually slow, and is commonly preceded by anxiety and even violence. As a result we now use periods of transition as an acceptable means of minimizing the impact of change

When dealing with the collateral issues of change, disciplines from divergent backgrounds often find that they share in a number of commonalities. Since the 1970s, for example, a number of feminist authors have questioned whether feminist mothers were capable of raising gender-liberated sons in a society that remained essentially patriarchal in nature (Dworkin, 1978). More recently a number of feminist researchers have commented on the fact that:

The work of raising anti-sexist sons has proven to be more difficult and daunting than the task of rearing feminist daughters. The task of raising a new “generation of men” is seldom supported by fathers or the world at large. Furthermore, many mothers worry that their feminine/feminist sons may find themselves misfits in a patriarchal society. (Thomas, 2001, p 121-140)

Concerns of a similar nature were also voiced by Hassan Howa in the 1970s when he stated that there could be “no normal sport in an abnormal society” (Black & Nauright, 1998, p 73), and that such changes would not become possible without a radical reconfiguration of South African society taking place. Since 1994 it has also become obvious that these changes could not be legislated into being.

Today architectural education finds itself in a similar quandary: nearly fifty years after Amos Rapoport published his seminal work House Form and Culture (1969), South African schools of architecture are still graduating students who, contrary to all they have been taught, continue to follow modernist patterns of architectural practice, unencumbered by thoughts of cultural colonialism, environmental degradation, globalization and historical context.

As in the case of genderised and racial patterns of behaviour, the answers to such questions probably lie in the nature of society itself, which is normally monolithic and bound by social inertia, and is thus resistant to most forms of non-revolutionary change. Faced with a society which has been hardened by a century of systematic exposure to racial and patriarchal values which appear to have found a natural home in the modernist movement, architectural education in South Africa has found it difficult to make headway against social values that predicate an anti-historicist and supposedly culturally neutral philosophy. In reality cultural neutralism is an oxymoron, and is merely another means of maintaining the status quo.

While many architectural educators in institutions of higher education have attempted to introduce the values and practices inherent in a context-based design methodology, architectural institutes remain firmly bound to the precepts of a service-orientated industry. Their corporate philosophy is modernist, their journals publish glossy modernist buildings with little intellectual substance, their prizes are awarded to modernist designs, and their architect-in-training programme is intended to induct young graduates into the modernist compound.

They have been assisted in this by the fact that many architectural educators were, at one stage, required by universities to continue in private practice while teaching academic courses. In many cases the idea of a private architect who is a part-time teacher has created a dichotomy in the educational system which has left many architecture students in a quandary as to which set of values to follow: practice or theory. The choice has invariably fallen on the practice side, the non-intellectual side, the side that passes off the aesthetics of modernism as architecture.

In this paper I look at the rise of the architect as a heroic figure in the field of creative thought, and the concomitant rise of modernist attitudes in the profession. I argue that cognitive and contextual thinking has always been a component of architecture since time immemorial, but that the rise of a modernist architectural philosophy during the early 20th century has led to the suppression of historical, regional and cultural identities, and to the alienation of architecture, and architects, from their wider social contexts. Finally I posit that the future of Architecture as a positive force in the design of built environments rests with a return of cognitive thinking to our educational process. It follows that this future lies in academia and not in the mono-dimensional values of a service-orientated industry.