OH Architecture: Residential

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Open House_Thursday: House Stekhoven // FROM THE ARCHIVE

In anticipation of tomorrow night's Open House Thursday, I would like to share some material that was sent to me by Antonio de Souza Santos. He designed the house together with Adèle Naudé Santos in the early 1970s. Enjoy!

OH14 - Adèle Naudé Santos and Antonio de Souza Santos

I am totally excited about OH14. Not only are we visiting the most exquisitely designed homes and apartments in Cape Town but the architects - highly acclaimed Adèle Naudé Santos and Antonio de Souza Santos WILL BE THERE!

Adèle Naudé Santos is the current dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in Boston and Antonio de Souza Santos (Tony) is a Professor of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Both have agreed to pause their very busy academic and practice schedules and join us in looking at these wonderful creations of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

OH14 will be a rare occasion to speak to, challenge and debate with these ex-South African architects about their work.

Thank you to C&CI and BASA for generously sponsoring this event.

To join OH14 BOOK HERE

House Shear

Stekhoven House

Scott Rd Apartments

Rowan Lane

OH12 Garden Route

This time OH tours went national, well not exactly national – but let’s say ‘further a field’. The Architectural Forum of Knysna Plettenberg Bay invited me to show the work of that area. This is a significant step for OH tours because it seems that for the first time others have also begun to see the value of their architectural environment and decided to act on it. Of course I agreed and the result was a weekend trip to Knysna and Plett to look at some gorgeous holiday houses along the Garden Route– not bad for a long weekend. I was moved by three houses: House Elphick by Design Workshop, House Kemp by Peter Rich and Beach House Philips by Noero Wolff.

First of all, I don’t believe in luxury homes, let alone luxury HOLIDAY homes. I think that it is an anti – Marxist idea and promotes conspicuous consumption. That is until I walked into House Elphick, situated on the most exclusive beachfront ridge in Plettenberg Bay. It is an unapologetic display of wealth, but rather than showing us: hey! look at these expensive finishes I got from the far corners of god-knows-where – the money was spent on real invention: a louver system that is as much a party trick as it is a dynamic spatial experience. A colleague, who shares my semi-Marxists ideals, said to me that she was walking through the house thinking to herself, ‘I’m not suppose to like this, but I do.’ I share her sentiment – finally a luxury house with some real architectural thought and invention as opposed to the empty allure of luxury.

House Elphick - Design Workshop

House Kemp by Peter Rich, on the other end of the scale is a wooden cottage built with a tight budget. To me, even though it was a third of the size of House Elphick, it surpasses it in terms of spatial generosity quite simply because it seems unbounded by its own structure. Mevrou Kemp told me that 28 people happily camped out in this 4 bedroomed house one Christmas. This is because the house accommodates the compromises one is willing to make when on holiday, a sort of rejection, in a way of the up-tightness of the luxury holiday get away.

House Kemp - Peter Rich

Beach House Philips presents a middle ground between House Kemp and House Elphick. It is neither lavish nor monastic. Unlike House Elphick it sits inside of a suburban holiday neighbourhood but unlike House Kemp, it has a substantial view of the sea. What can I say, for me, Beach House Phillips is really about true architectural inventiveness: formally, diagrammatically and technically. Photo Credits: H Wolff

Beach House Phillips - Noero Wolff

OH10 VDMMA Monograph

Van der Merwe Miszewski Architects headed by Anja Van der Merwe and Macio Miszewski is a practice mainly engaged in the designing of luxury homes. But what struck me about Tree House as well as Courtyard House (Anja’s personal home) is not the luxury of the building but the luxury of the space that it inhabits, makes and responds to. Tree House has always been a fascination for me. From the street, one sees a foot bridge, a wall which half conceals the interior and some interesting tree-like roof trusses supporting a thin concrete slab. The interior is tightly planned which I think forms a wonderful balance with the vast openness of the outside, appropriate for a city building. Courtyard House, as a suburban house, takes advantage of the big garden, the luxury of the suburbs. Being in Newlands it has the luxury to look at the mountain where as Tree House has the luxury to be in the mountain. Photo: H Wolff

Courtyard House

Tree House

OH8 & 9 Fagan Monographs

There is a couple in Cape Town who has had a major influence on South African Architecture. They are prolific in the amount of knowledge that they produce in the form of books, photographs, research and of course – architecture. As a married couple, and I was fortunate to be at their 60th wedding anniversary in 2009, Gwen and Gawie Fagan have inspired, informed and provoked architects not only in Cape Town but much further a field. The tour tried to acknowledge a career spanning over 60 years by showing the most notable conservation projects as well as their best new buildings. The climax of the tour was when all 100 + visitors squashed into their beach house in Langebaan to listen to them talk about their work and their life.

This was a truly memorable experience. Photo Credit: H Wolff

UCT Institute of Infectious Diseases and Molecular Medicine

Die Es

Paradys

Klein Constantia

OH6 Pius Pahl Monograph

I started becoming intrigued by Pius Pahl when, at the Bauhaus museum in Berlin, I spotted a couple of his drawings on display. They were drawings of buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe who was one of the teachers at the Bauhaus School in Weimar from 1930 - 1933. I started investigating Pahl and found out that he was a German architect who married a South African woman and decided to move to a quiet dorpie of Stellenbosch shortly after World War II. He opened up a practice in Stellenbosch and the result is that Stellenbosch now has the biggest collection of private homes designed in the Bauhaus tradition. I just had to visit them.

Luckily I was not the only Bauhaus/Pahl enthusiast and I got in contact with a man who not only owns one of these Pahl gems but also restores and maintains his house in the suitable manner which respects the original intentions. He invited me to see his house and also put me in touch with other owners, who might I add, are very much aware of the significance of their properties. What struck me the most is the modesty in scale of these homes - service areas like bathrooms and kitchens are strictly utilitarian whereas the living areas are much more generous. This is in stark contrast to today's contemporary houses with large kitchens and expansive bathrooms. Photo credits: H Wolff, Architect and Builder

Huis Struwig

Huis Botha

Huis van Aarde

Huis Paauw

Huis Malan

Huis Trumpelmann

OH4 Style Living

Unable to attend because of a family obligation, I regret not seeing House J as from the plans and subsequent photos it seems like an elegant addition to the Simonstown built fabric against the back drop of the mountain. I have visited both Bridge House and Ella Street Houses on separate occasions and these are my thoughts: Bridge House is a strategic use of the site. The courtyard is really a spectacular arena to entertain, relax as well as revel in the ARCHITECTURE of the house. Unlike VDMMA’s other work Bridge House is, however, a rather tame design with less architectural innovation. Ella Street houses is a cheerful intervention in the equally cheerful city-neighborhood of Bo-Kaap. The internal resolution of the space is perhaps slightly too busy for my liking.

Ella Street House - Team Architects

Bridge House - VDMMA

OH1 At peace in an architect’s home.

They say that a carpenter’s cupboards are always unfinished and that an accountant's personal finances are always in a mess. Is this true of architects and their own homes? Well we were most pleasantly surprised that the architect’s homes that we visited on this tour were just wonderful expressions of their thoughts and design ethos. And although some, like Gawie Fagan, claims that his house is incomplete, many of the homes lacked pretence and gave us an insight into what it means to live in a place or in more philosophical terms: to dwell. Martin Heidegger, a phenomenologist philosopher writes that to dwell is to be at peace in a protected place. This is the case with Professor Jo Noero’s home in Hout Bay which not only offers protection from the harsh seafront climate but also a way of viewing the sea. We definitely experienced ‘dwelling’ in his living room that day while the professor frantically served tea to all the OH visitors.

Die Es - Gawie Fagan

House Sapieka - Noero Wolff

House Elliot - Julian Elliot

Kenilworth Flats - Naude Dos Santos