African/modernism: Meanings of modernism in South Africa
[A lecture delivered at the University of Johannesburg, 18 May 2022]
The story of architectural modernism has been conventionally told through a particular range of narratives and cannons that are largely Euro-American - with style, technology, climate, housing and town planning being some of the most common lenses through which to understand and engage it.
Yet due to the global reach of western colonialism at the time of its origins, the impacts, experiences and meanings of modernism in colonial Africa and elsewhere is vastly more extensive and complex. In African contexts for example, "African modernism" at the time of national independence would later become another important area of scholarship.
Still more recently, some scholars have begun to address the question of the 'colonial modern', since modernism as an art-architecture movement that emerged out of the late colonial period embodied many of its premises and outlooks. This remains a fundamental dimension of modernism that is also one of its most neglected areas of scholarship.
The lecture addresses this question of the colonial modern - not an "African modernism" (i.e. a question of region or style), but "African/modernism" (as a question of coloniality).
Sources:
Chipkin, C. M. 1993. Johannesburg Style - Architecture & Society 1880s - 1960s. Cape Town: David Phillip.
Fletcher, B. 1905. A history of architecture on the Comparative Method. London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co.
Hickel, J. 2014. ‘Engineering the Township Home: Domestic Transformations and Urban Revolutionary Consciousness’, in Ekhaya: The Politics of Home in Kwazulu-Natal, ed. by Meghan Healy-Clancy and Jason Hickel. Pietermaritzburg, SA: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, pp. 131–61
Le Corbusier. 1986 [1931]. Towards a New Architecture. Translated by Frederick Etchells. New York: Dover Publications.
Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret). 1987. Journey to the east. Translated by Ivan Zaknic and Nicole Pertuiset. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Image credit: Santiago Borja's 'Destinerrance', installed at Villa Savoye, 2011, Poissy, France.