Chapter Five
Dissidence - at Home and Abroad
Still in the 1950's

 

A tripod of certainties

Until I connected with Beate, I could probably be described as what Herbert Marcuse might have termed an one-and-a-bit dimensional man. She helped me - mostly by example - to something approaching three-dimensionality. There were then three legs to my being: the relationship with her, my now rapidly developing love of architecture and our joint political commitments - the tripod of certainties on which, with unexpected stability, I had begun to stand. Mention of the first is, I suppose, yet another confirmation of the fulfilling, the uxorious nature of our partnership; a characteristic that has taken us through fifty and more years of mutual affection, tumult and, at times, severely strained relations. Marriage a la mode?

For me, the final year of architectural studies, 1949, was the best by far. I found a colleague, an ex-serviceman, with whom to prepare for the examinations. Together, we ably re-enforced each others’ strengths and bolstered our respective weaknesses - a neat instance of co-operative labour. And, most important, I came to enjoy the design tasks which the architectural staff set for us. These, the very core of our studies, were no longer necessary chores on which I felt compelled to toil. They had become absorbing challenges, they raised issues and posed problems that I revelled in confronting. I happily recall having to design a furniture factory which caught and gripped my imagination as I worked on it at the drawing board in the Hirschmann household, all of whose members seemed to become involved at various stages. It was an accomplished design project; one that crowned a particularly joyful, studious, fruitful year.

I was spurred on by two young tutors, Carl Pinfold and Angus Stewart, with each of whom I had previously established a rapport. They appeared to understand the blockages that I had sought, unsuccessfully, to overcome. They were able to advise me purposefully, constructively. They were quite unlike the smugly facetious, condescending members of the senior staff. These were men who readily patronised purportedly ‘weak’ students, one of whom they patently considered me. They were as unimpressed with me as I was with them, and the many other similarly complacent ‘leading academics’ who I was to meet in my latter years.

Two dozen years on, when Carl Pinfold lectured at the School of Architecture in the University of Liverpool and I at my home university in Cardiff, I was honoured by his recommendation that I serve as external examiner to the thesis his wife, Betty Spence, had submitted in candidature for a Master’s degree. Thereafter, we became co-examiners, good friends, like-minded visitors to each others’ institutions.

Ever a rebel, I did not attend the medieval jamboree that ended my, and has been the culmination of other degree course - the graduation ceremony. The notion of dressing myself in a black, heavy middle-ages gown, of wearing a matching mortar-board, an also bygone headgear, seemed ludicrous; especially at the height of an highveld summer. Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg, Leyden, the Sorbonne and the many venerated, doubtless venerable university institutions of Europe seemed far too distant in time, place and spirit to serve as models for all but the doubtless venerable bureaucratic leaders of my university. I received my degree in absentia.

Within days of graduation, I found employment. Beate and I needed cash for getting to and keeping us in Europe for the twelve or so months we intended spending there. She had resigned from her glamorous, well-paid job as an air hostess with South African Airways to enrol in a teachers’ training course. Her graduation was due in two years. We, like the many young ex-colonials of Britain’s wide-flung, then disappearing ex-Empire, had decided to make our ‘grand tour,’ our journey of adventure to where, we had been told, civilisation, culture, art, music - all that really mattered - had originated, developed. Get away from Johannesburg, we were urged, see the capital cities of Europe - that’s where it’s really happening. Maybe ... we had to see for ourselves.

My first architectural employment was makeshift: work where the money is, Beate and I decided. I had, to no financial avail, approached two prestigious practitioners. One was an architect in Pretoria who had been trained at the famous Bauhaus in Germany, a school of art and design comparable only to the similarly renowned VKHUTEMAS institution in Moscow. That had been summarily closed in the Stalinist reaction to modernism. He, Helmut Stauch, insisted that I live in Pretoria, forty miles from where Beate was studying. If not, my hardly handsome earnings would vanish in travel costs. My second, most desired employer, the principal of an exacting design firm in central Johannesburg, offered what amounted to a below minimum salary. He was sufficiently in demand by eager prospective design assistants to set exacting conditions, including low pay. The salary he proposed was lousy, insufficient to help us reach Europe, let alone live there.

I had no choice but to graft in a commercial office, where design standards were determined by the commissions available from get-rich-quick, take-every-short-cut speculators, principally self-trained building contractors. They were anything but fussy about the poor architectural designs to which they supposedly built and the suspect ‘craftsmanship’ which they took for granted. In a boom-time, we recent graduates were perforce given responsibilities beyond our scope. On this basis, I designed but did not further develop an up-market suburban block of apartments and a very large office block in the city, both of which I completed on returning to Johannesburg in 1953. Thankfully, the tight, British-based structural bye-laws then in force saved many building occupants, and us, from unpleasant consequences. More than fifty years later, I shudder on passing those buildings and, flippantly, urge others not to enter them.

My colleagues and I discussed the positions in which some found themselves at the end of a five-year university course: executing shoddy designs for the shoddy buildings of shoddy speculators. This talk endorsed our feelings of helpless hopelessness. Our employers - recognising that they had trimmed, severed their student dreams to become hacks for crass clients - were sympathetic but unable to help further. During that twenty-two month period, I worked assiduously on detailing kitchens, bathrooms and built-in furniture for expensive new houses. In that too, I was fortunate, there were many other more mundane tasks that I was able to avoid. Later, I came to appreciate what I’d learnt - detailing is, I realised, a necessary, integral part of design.

We neophytes were subjected to japes which, one imagines, most architectural rookies experience. For example, I was called on to detail an intricate external stairway that led nowhere, except back down. My professional employers did not, in this respect, differ from the shop-floor workers in Uncle Henry’s factory. There I had been sent to the stores with urgent requests for non-existent tools and materials.

 

Politics in the early 1950s

I return to politics, the third major dimension of my existence. By now Beate and I had joined the Communist Party, there to be placed in an underground cell consisting of ourselves and two other comrades, one of whom was our link to ‘the Centre.’ The secrecy was nominal; we and the Special Branch had clear notions about who was in and who out - the Party was not a drawcard for a mass membership. It did, though, give us access to black comrades, members of the ANC. The Springbok Legion had disbanded to be replaced by the Congress of Democrats, a body of whites that, together with the ANC, the SA Indian Congress and the Coloured People’s Organisation, formed the Congress Alliance.

The Minister of Justice, CR Swart, had, under the chummy rubric “I remain your obedient servant,” signed an order “naming” me as a “supporter of the Communist Party.” His qualification, “supporter,” was correct, though probably inadvertent: I was an inwardly hesitant fellow traveller, not an ardent, wholeheartedly committed Party cadre. A dissident among dissenters. In terms of the Minister’s newly promulgated Suppression of Communism Act, even that qualified condition barred me from publishing material for which approval had not been granted, and prohibited me from “attending gatherings of two or more people meeting for a common purpose.” The two other members of our Party cell had been similarly selected, as were many of our acquaintances and friends. Indeed, a half-dozen of us wrote to ask whether or not we may sleep with our spouses. This, we noted, seemed the most “common purpose” one might devise. Mr Swart did not respond.

Our cell met at the exclusive Automobile Club (TAC) in Killarney, Johannesburg, where, on his retirement, my father had bought me a long-term membership. We regularly swam and played squash there. The cosy, English home-counties chintzes, costly decor and ever so solicitous staff seemed, we thought, to offer an appropriate venue for clandestine, Marxist-Leninist gatherings. That, communist philosophy, was indeed the basis of our discussions, of our talks with the ‘link’ comrade. He spoke conversationally - quietly interpreting the current ‘line’ for us. He was, as I had always known him to be, interesting, but, in that context, as far removed from everyday life as this small group was in its secluded TAC sitting-room. I was, as before and after, not convinced by the tedious arguments about whether ‘the struggle’ in South Africa was essentially proletarian or principally one of national liberation. To me this putatively crucial distinction was, to put no theory-based gloss on it, doctrinal nit-picking. Resistance to southern African segregationist exploitation was, I believed, rooted in both conditions, simultaneously.

CR Swart’s gagging Act had succeeded in dampening our activities. Some minor issues apart, Beate and I were confined to such peripheral matters as helping in the preparations for the Defiance of Unjust Laws campaign (1952). As we were later to do vis-a-vis the Congress of the People (1955): these and like campaigns are described, with reference to verbatim citations, in Allison Drew’s South Africa’s Radical Tradition: A Documentary History, Volume 2: 1943-1964 (1997).

We were frustrated. Our white skins did not enable us readily to disappear in the ocean of people who constituted the majority population of the country. We remained the conspicuous sore thumbs we had been and would continue to be: white, middle-class, would-be revolutionaries - politically, and often socially isolated from our fellow whites and ever open to the suspicions of those with whom we wished to ally ourselves. To cap it, Beate and I were well on in our plans to capitalise on our privileges by journeying abroad. We felt awkwardly displaced.

As I recall, the Party was to direct its members into specific acts of defiance. Beate’s and my calls did not materialise. She, being less obedient than I, took matters into her own hands. With black friends, she went swimming in the segregated pool of Orlando, Soweto. Aside from curious glances from fellow swimmers, nothing happened - a non-event. But she had defied. That done, we were able to set off for Europe.

 

By Union Castle to Earls Court

Cape Town to London, 1950: two weeks of sunshine on board ship, lounging, reading, playing chess, cooling off in a plunge pool. We stopped briefly at St Helena where the Emperor Napoleon’s past presence hung over the tiny population; as, for us, did that of South Africa’s Prince Dinuzulu and his small entourage. They had been incarcerated there after the mighty British army crushed the Zulu impis in the late 19th Century. An island of defeat, a place to which victors sent their humiliated foes. St Helena, where the ghastly silences of distant warfare defeated even the most raucous of stormy oceans.

The chess was traumatic. There were enthusiasts who taught us more in two or three games than we’d learnt in years. Having glimpsed the possibilities of the great game, I realised that, if indulged, it could come to dominate one’s life. Retreat, withdrawal seemed the only feasible choice. That was confirmed by the fellow passenger who came daily, intently to watch us, who occasionally muttered quietly to himself or “tsk-tsked” a move. How have I blundered a player might ask her or himself? Then, encouraged by our little group, one of the stronger players among us invited him to a game: “Oh no, I don’t touch chess any longer,” an embarrassed smile and a stroll to another part of the deck.

The sun was shut out as we sailed through the Bay of Biscay. There the loyal Brits aboard reeled on hearing from the ship’s radio that their king, George, had died. Almost noiselessly we sailed into Southampton, the London docks having been closed for the royal funeral. So, by British Rail we travelled through ceaseless, cold evening rain to Paddington station and, nearby, the ‘digs’ in the Earls Court area that we had reserved. This B&B accommodation was spare: a tiny lobby off which the bedroom, a bathroom-kitchen and built-in wardrobe opened; all under the roof of a four-storey terrace house. Breakfast was served in the basement, five floors down. The accommodation was minute, easy to keep clean and tidy, admirably suited to our absences - at the concerts, recitals, operas, plays, lectures, films for which we thirsted.

London had us caught in its constant round of compelling attractions. The always beautiful, trimly manicured countryside drew us on weekends. We became attuned to the climate, but not to the smog that left pillows a grimy grey around the white, outlined heads of sleepers. We were surprised by other distinctly non-South African events; like, on a foggy evening, finding a double-decker bus halted in an off-route suburban byway. After we had boarded, the driver followed his conductor/guide walking, lit torch in hand, until we reached a dimly recognisable main road.

With the other hicks from the ex-colonies - all of whom appeared to have crowded themselves into Earls Court - we gawped at, listened to and walked the streets of cold, wet London in pursuit of ‘culture.’ John Gielgud, Joan Plowright and Lawrence Oliver peopled my dreams against stage sets like the renowned Roehampton Lane housing estate, Inigo Jones’ magnificent Banqueting Hall on Whitehall. The Festival Hall, its quite wondrous acoustic qualities, absorbed our musical energies. London’s architecture was, is, gripping. As, after 1963, I grew to know the city more intimately, I came the more to appreciate, to love it. London, the inexhaustible.

Beate undertook a spell of ‘supply teaching’ in schools requiring temporary assistants until she found a more satisfying, semi-permanent post in Hampstead. I was engaged on short-term employment in the office of Fry, Drew, Drake and Lasdun. That was tremendous. Working under Denys Lasdun, I learnt that the rewards of unhurried, profoundly thoughtful design are fine buildings, eminently habitable interiors, adroitly planted external settings, singing hearts, alerted sensibilities. We spared no effort. I recall working for more than a week at the drawing board and in the basement workshop on designing an humble staircase handrail! I spent further weeks modelling and designing a set of shaped columns for the Assembly Hall of the splendid school that was then Lasdun’s major project.

The columns were to be of pre-cast concrete brought on site to stand on concrete aprons at ground level, from where they would support the canted roof of the Hall. I made numerous models in a variety of scales, drew numberless sketches to finally be voted approval by Lasdun and his colleagues, my fellow team members. We met each Friday afternoon for prolonged discussions - frequently ending in the adjoining pub - of our work. Each of us had to explain, and convince the others. All were to be aware and proud of what the team was jointly responsible. Direct action?

Having won this coveted approval, I started the construction drawings, the largest model placed on the floor next my desk. The process was labourious: we used black Indian Ink in delicately set traditional bow-pens on sheets of linen that were fixed to the board by large brass drawing pins. As I was at work, Lasdun entered our spatially elegant first-floor office - in a splendidly converted Georgian house - with a companion. They spoke French, not quite the language of a Jo’burg high-school background. The visitor, dressed in a food-stained black suit, wearing black-rimmed spectacles, was the famed Le Corbusier. His eyes fell on the model and then my drawing. Off he went speaking rapid French, gesticulating toward the other models and drawings in the office to, horror of profoundly flattering horrors, draw over my painstaking details. His plans drawn in a heavy black, greasy charcoal pencil on top of his sections, elevations and illustrative sketches. A fascinating jumble.

He stopped with what must have been a summary remark and left the office with Lasdun. Hardly had the door shut behind them, than Theo Crosby, also originally a South African, whipped the linen, the master’s sketches off my board. He, a tall man, held them above my head cheered on by our laughing colleagues. Unperturbed by my shrill protests, he jested that a rude colonial like me should be more alert when in the company of grabbing imperialists. Years later, during my three decades of exile in Britain, Theo would boast about his original Le Corbusier. I would demand its return. After his death, in the mid-1990s, I wrote in condolence to his widow; who replied that on his joking insistence in the weeks before his death, she would keep but, at last, thank me for my “generous” gift.

The Fry/Drew office was permeated with what I had come to recognise as a characteristically upper, upper middle-class view; a view to which at least some of those privileged demi-aristocrats subscribed. Epitomised by, say, Charles Kingsley’s benign Christian socialism, they posited and, perforce, patronisingly practised a notion of service to one’s less fortunate human beings - a willingly embraced moral cost of privilege. Accordingly, our Friday ‘happy hour’ discussions centred on questions about prospective building users’ needs. How were our designs and details to accommodate the life-styles of people with whom we had little, if any, social contact? That, of course, was a consequence of the ‘democratisation’ of architecture so earnestly implemented and anticipated by the pioneers of the modern movement. We were socially, economically, historically removed from our ultimate ‘user clients.’

This was our most frequent topic of debate. We repeatedly reminded ourselves of a then current instance, the case of a re-housed fishing community on the Shetland Islands. Its members had been provided with new homes; complete with, inter alia, compact, functionally efficient, separate kitchens. A major social blunder. Their previously larger cooking areas had also been social spaces: warm family living rooms and, of signal importance, the long winter evening venues for neighbourly gatherings during which fishing nets and similar items were mended communally. That had been the kernel of the Islanders’ social lives: gone, lost to well-intentioned, socially distant design decisions. And, in the prevalent attitude of bemused disdain for the supposedly parvenu disciplines of social-anthropology, sociology and social-psychology, we were doomed to well-meaning personal conjecture. We cared but had no informed resources, only individual speculation, on which to call.

I met other South African architects. Bernard Gosschalk, who was working in the Ministry of Public Works, took me into the roof of Westminster Abbey, an extraordinary structural experience. He showed me carved craftsmen, carvers who, backsides over high level cornices, were excreting in sandstone onto the sculpted, upturned faces of Bishops, Kings and Queens far below. Medieval dissenters to each crouching, grinning man.

Persuaded by another friend from home, I worked for three months in the internationally respected architectural offices of the London County Council (LCC). There I became embroiled in searching discussions among left-wing supporters and opponents of socialist realist architecture. The debates included Soviet and Eastern European designers who had been invited to address us. That could not have occurred in fascist, apartheid-obsessed South Africa.

I also found a developed, if somewhat technocratic, attitude to the troublesome notion of ‘user needs.’ Here, the genteel Fry/Drew, thoughtful architectural concern had been harnessed in pursuit of technical consultation with future or potential building occupants. Throughout the various divisions of the LCC’s architectural offices - eg., housing, schools, public premises such as libraries - the personnel were required to attend to what was termed “user requirements.” They were required to arrange for and respect the findings of formal sociological surveys, detailed, pre-structured interviews and pressed, public selection from ingeniously modelled alternatives. That was the beginnings of a concern with which I became pre-occupied when, a decade later, I began my graduate career as an architectural research worker in the University of Wales.

Exhausted by but not satiated with southern England, we gave notice to our respective employers, our landlady and friends. We were off to attend a meeting of the International Union of Students in Romania by hitch-hiking - in colloquial Italian, autostopisti - through North-Eastern France, West Germany, Austria to Bucharest and then Italy.

 

Autostopisti on the continent

Nikolaus Pevsner’s An Outline of European Architecture (1943 edition) and the lists of contemporary buildings I had accumulated were tucked into an outside pocket of my back-pack. If we failed to visit them all, it was by mishap, not intent. We looked in at every art gallery and museum to which our increasingly weary legs carried us and our soon over-burdened minds could absorb. It was art, architecture, movies, concert halls and opera houses wherever we found them - in cities, towns and villages. We were unrelenting culture hunters. In Vienna, at Wagner’s Tannhauser, we were shocked to be lectured at, in German, about the apparently unforgivable disrespect of being dressed in a less than haute bourgeois fashion. In Paris we were loudly upbraided for not tipping the usherette at a flea-bitten cinema where Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky was showing, with French subtitles. We seemed, unfailingly, able to offend quite ordinary social expectations.

We usually slept in youth hostels; small hotels were special treats for occasional bouts of luxuriating in a bath, sleeping late and wolfing scrumptious meals. The hostels varied from unkempt to immaculate accommodation. The superintendent of a particularly smart German example refused my wife and I a shared room; until, in her nuanced German, she addressed him with menacing control. She capped that by waving each of the documents she and I had that recorded our status in his face. Bureaucracy confounded; I was delighted.

The other hostel visitors were sources of insider information, guidance and advice. We knew when and to where we ought to travel next. There were few tourists abroad - the war had closed only six years earlier, civilian hitch-hikers were not common. Lifts came easily, often with wonderfully kind bids to take us long distances and treat us to meals en route. We were only once discomforted, when we accepted an invitation to ride in a massive motor-car transporter-truck. I was shoved into a car at the rear, Beate rode in the front cabin with the driver and his mate. As we started to move, I realised how stupid we’d been. I hooted, hooted and hooted in the tiny new Fiat, especially as we passed through a largish town. Angry, the driver stopped. We climbed off, thanked him and walked off. We had learnt.

We travelled for three months through France, Germany and Austria, gulping ravenously at the ‘culture,’ lost in the stunning, swiftly changing scenery and city-scapes, relishing the opportunities to meet and talk to local, endlessly interesting, ever-friendly people. We learnt first-hand, more about Western European art and the history of that work than a dozen courses might have offered us. I fell over and over in love with architecture - the craft and art of conceiving, designing, erecting and occupying buildings. Life on the trot was full, exciting. Then, from Vienna, by slow, very slow train to Bucharest.

Our student hosts aside, the English speaking Romanians we met did not enthuse at all about ‘actually existing socialism.’ They were already in the grip of an oligarchic, ‘heroic communist’ family that was to dominate, to terrorise them in the name of socialism for a further four decades. Deservedly, I cannot recall the correct spelling of the dictators’ name - Nicolae Ceausescu perhaps? He remains, however, memorable for the tortures he instituted and the palace of megalomaniacal size that he had built for himself and his family. His, his wife’s and their son’s vicious street deaths during a popular uprising were burnt onto the minds of all who witnessed that fierce vengeance on international television. Their fate was not for being the charming, benevolently democratic father, mother, son of a grateful nation.

In less than ten days, we left unhappy Romania for Hungary, Italy and Switzerland - saddened, disillusioned, far from optimistic about its people’s future. Thomas Jefferson’s observation was all too apposite:

“When the government fears the people, there is liberty;
when the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”

The message could well have been even more pithy: “Get rid of the damn government.” Or, better, I might have anticipated Bertold Brecht’s response to an official complaint that, during the Berlin uprising, ‘the people’ had proved themselves ungrateful to the authorities. In that case, he suggested, the Party - the government - should abolish the people and elect another.

In Hungary for barely two days, we had time only to look at and devour the beautiful twin city of Budapest. We met a leftist South African couple who had escaped the focussed hostility of their home country - the liaison was ‘mixed’ - to settle here. He, a dark-skinned Indian, told us that, from his arrival, he’d been accosted by small children who, spit-wet fingers, tried brusquely to rub off his colour. From there, again by slow train, loaded with gorgeous Hungarian salami, to Vienna and on to Italy.

Italy in summer: chock-full of handsome architecture, crammed with historical art, bursting with glorious opera, awash with vivacious, amiable, gesticulating people. In a characteristically generalised assessment, our war-scarred SAAF instructors had assured my fellow aspirant pilots and I that, in contrast to their German opponents, ‘the Italians’ had been unworthy fighters. Here in Italy I came to think the local emphasis on convivial sociability infinitely preferable to “the dogs of war.”

We waited for an hitch-hiking lift in the Alps, at fashionable Cortina d’Ampezzo. One arrived in the form of a snappy, open-roofed sports car with three gleeful, middle-aged men crowded into the front seat. They packed us and our bulging back-packs into the rear, from where we began entertaining them with our limited repertoire of Italian songs, many of which were markedly left-wing. They, like us, were heading for Venice. On the way we stopped at numerous villages to test their boasts about the local wines. Eventually, a little hazily, we dined, at their pressing invitation, in an open-air restaurant on exquisitely grilled local fish. Plus more wine. Late that night, they dropped us on the Lido beach where, groggily, we tucked ourselves into our sleeping-bags. As we walked to the bus-stop the next morning, we were greeted by the town butcher, one of our delightful friends from the previous evening.

Then, on the outskirts of Bologna - for many years, a socialist controlled, quite remarkably beautiful ancient city - we attended a joint Communist/Socialist Party festa, a jolly celebration in which food, drink, dancing and singing featured insistently. The District Secretary of the Communist Party was fascinated by our report of conditions at home, where a fascistic government had just been elected on a qualified franchise. He offered us accommodation in his home, gave us a breakfast of steaming porridge, a mug of hot coffee each and a list of Communist and Socialist Party comrades who we were to visit in villages, towns and cities on the way to Naples, our destination. A wonderful man, for whom the condescending description, “salt of the earth,” might well have been coined.

We travelled down the Party-line to hospitable treatment wherever we presented ourselves, including a tiny pizza cubicle on Capri where, we were told, the great Lenin had habitually played chess, where he had finally quit the game because, he said, his involvement threatened his revolutionary commitment.

On the way to Paestum, an ancient Greek settlement south of Naples, we were ‘lifted’ by a leftist travelling salesman - the country seemed filled with left-wingers in those heady post-war days. He had passed by but knew nothing of the legacy of three ruined Doric temples which the colonising Greeks had left circa BC 640 to 450. We persuaded him to accompany us, sharing our packed lunches and flasks of light wine with him. Astonished and transfixed he stayed to enjoy those powerful buildings by the sea. Like us, he was particularly taken with the bold Temple of Poseidon. Afterwards, driving us back to the Youth Hostel in Naples, he said we need not have travelled all the way from South Africa; had we contacted him, he would gladly have sent us post-cards.

We made our way up Italy, frequently on the Party line, to the plains of Lombardy and the capital city, Milan with its grandiloquent Galleria Vittorio Emanuele (1865-77). Now autumn, the weather was drawing in. We had feasted on Italian diversity: on its extra-ordinary cultural heritage, its peasant-based cuisine, its wonderful wines, cheeses, pizzas, its delightfully welcoming people, its engulfing leftist hospitality.

As winter closed in on us, we hitched north to spruce, neat, ever-so bourgeois Switzerland where a couple we had met in Romania had promised us accommodation in their ‘squat,’ a derelict schloss. There we burnt Swiss Communist Party pamphlets to keep warm. Sitting, early one evening, in a sheltered corner of a park in Geneva, we watched snugly dressed people hurrying home. Beate and I eyed each other quizzically. We were weary, homesick, not a little frightened. Far from un-embattled in this period of close proximity, we had survived, endured if not bloomed in the doubts, uncertainties, insecurities, fears of foreign travel and early marriage. It was all too patently time to quit. We left for London where we stayed briefly with friends until Beate returned by Union Castle to a warmer South Africa. I re-visited Vienna for a week as one of two South African delegates to an international congress called by the World Peace Council.

In Vienna, I met up with Bram Fischer, surely the most distinguished of our delegates. Others at the gathering were interested in South African events; we were, noticeably, among the earliest of the wartime allies that had moved toward fascism so soon after World War II. Bram addressed many meetings while I looked on smiling and scowling as seemed appropriate. He and I were impressed by the array of impressive people who attended the congress - Pablo Picasso from France, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Ilya Ehrenburg from the USSR, the Red Dean from Canterbury and many others. Bram was further impressed with the lesson I gave him in drying damp clothes in an hotel room: pressing them wet against mirrors and/or onto smooth walls. That done, I too returned home.

 

User requirements and its progeny

In the mid-1970s I reported an architectural/sociological study that I had conducted among British architects. A portion of the work focussed on the concept of user requirements. The main elements were published in the Journal of Architectural Research (August 1976) under the title ‘Professional Ideology: the Architectural Notion of “User Requirements.”’ That carried a pragmatic explanation of the notion which I had found in the Royal Institute of British Architects’ (the RIBA’s) major publication of the previous decade, the Handbook of Architectural Practice and Management (1965). It defined the notion and indicated its significance for designers:

In 1971, Robert Maguire, a past President of the RIBA, depicted the notion in a more direct manner:

Later, after the establishment of democratic governance in South Africa, I found an extension to these somewhat pious, self-affirming statements. User requirements had by then been absorbed into the broader ambit of what came to be known as ‘user participation in building design.’

The term ‘participation’ had come to permeate everyday talk in South Africa, especially since that wondrous, tumultuous day of freedom, the inauguration of President Mandela on 27 April 1994. Like the frequently associated and similarly popular words ‘community’ and ‘development,’ the notion can seldom be readily defined. Everyday depictions are characteristically diffuse, imprecise; the meanings attributed to them, while commonly acknowledged, are not necessarily agreed on widely. On one issue, however, there appeared to have been, and still is, some consensus: an urgent need, in developmental activities, for public, for community, for people's participation.

Under the apartheid regime, from about 1970 onward, development - that is, the impoverished simulation of those distorted times - was imposed directly or via leaders who had been chosen, were maintained and controlled by government agencies. Consulting with, let alone inviting `the people' to participate in their futures was scarcely part of the official perspective. Development focussed principally on providing minimal services and facilities from above. As practised under that regime, it comprised an exercise in engineered, in manipulated consent. It was used as a tool of social control. Community participation via appointed ‘leaders’ was but a poorly veiled guise for incorporation, for domination.

At least in the rhetoric, and increasingly in specific projects, that changed. In the excitement of post-apartheid freedom, negotiation with community leaders democratically elected by the people became accepted as a prerequisite. Even direct involvement - not, that is to say, necessarily mediated through leaders - was/is advocated. Development, the argument ran, must enable people to enhance their autonomy, to exercise their abilities to act independently and effectively in social and productive life. So, in architectural and planning projects that deal with health, housing, education and similar matters, community involvement was/is said no longer to be optional. It is posited as the precursor and founding ingredient of building programmes. Indeed institutions funded by central government - for example, the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) and the Independent Development Trust (IDT) - made financial support conditional on promised participatory practices.

Given the historical and cultural overlays to notions of development and participation, one is hardly surprised to find that efforts to devise a fully participatory model of development in architectural work have been problematic. Dilemmas encountered in implementing action of this type on major, large-scale projects have been reported and analysed in, for instance, Steven Friedman's study (1993) of what he terms "the politics of negotiated development" and Lindsay Bremner's account (1994) of “development and resistance” at Phola Park.

My research colleagues and I have confronted similar, perhaps more limited issues in the projects with which we have been involved: for instance, the new, IDT-funded Aha Setjaba Primary School in Tumahole, Orange Free State (1995) and a year later, the refurbished Workers’ Library on the Cultural Precinct, Newtown, Johannesburg. We have confirmed what we might have been expected to know: user participation is an open-ended endeavour, not a closed, finite exercise.