ALEXANDER OPPER

Architect and senior lecturer in the Department of Architecture, University of Johannesburg. His professional practice focuses on the theory and production of architecturally-inspired furniture and installation environments

PLAYING BALL, OR, A FRIENDLY BETWEEN TWO PRIVATE PUBLICS: THE JOHANNESBURG ART GALLERY AND JOUBERT PARK

The site of this studio is defined by a strange half-way line of sorts, a line which separates two perfectly unbalanced margins of each other, namely the private public of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) and its estranged neighbour, Joubert Park.

Dictionaries throw up interesting defensive associations in their traditional definitions of the three main typologies making up the scape[1] which represents the site for the above studio:
The gallery is seen as a 'protected' area for the display of art; the park as another, for recreation and the line of the palisade - which currently separates the above-mentioned two urban pieces - 'defends' the one from the other.

PIERRE SWANEPOEL studioMAS ARCHITECTS

RE-IMAGINING SANDTON

Re-imagining the established suburbs of Johannesburg involves a sustained critique of the way people move, live, interact and trade over a large area. If we can look at the city in this way, we would require more than the status quo, which simply allocates Uses to isolated pieces of land (usually fenced) that are accessible only when assisted by vehicles. We would like to suggest that a critical (and optimistic) approach might rather instigate thinking towards the possibility of creating adaptable (multiply controllable) spaces that both arrange themselves around - and are able to accommodate - both human and car scale. Can we go from the divided now into an integrated future? Sandton is, probably, the ultimate project of car-privileged access and 'islanding'. The fact is, however, that there is a huge pedestrian and small scale component which is relegated to un-integrated edges and traffic islands. In other words, we would suggest that the same paradigm governs the environment of both the 'included' and of the 'excluded'.

STEPHEN HOBBS AND MARCUS NEUSTETTER

THE TRINITY SESSION - Public Art Makers and Strategists

THE BURBS, THE WALLS: UNFOLDING TOWNSHIP

The continuous network of routes that links our private domains is notably lacking in any form of amenity for its many pedestrian users, and the private boundary wall could be seen to erect the ultimate barrier to public interaction, or exchange between citizens, and the inhabitants of the city. This situation could be read forward to hold some forbidding philosophical ramifications….

This studio proposes that every boundary wall, or every public artwork, should be legislated to provide at least 3 public functions. Could we look at our car- and wall-dominated (increasingly anonymous) streets as a continuous urban park network?

How would an initiative of this kind challenge the prevailing cultural notions of paranoia and lock-down against the 'public'? What are the exteriors that contemporary Joburg (-which could be seen, perhaps, as a "world-class interior")

Architects, Urban Planners & Landscape Architects

"...transformation of all our situations into a favourable condition."

On this day we Honour the Memory of Architect Mohamed Atta, who was falsely accused of piloting the first passenger jet plane to crash into New York's World Trade Towers on the 11th September 2001. This ridiculous accusation remained unsubstantiated for years but has now been proven to be completely false.

Architect Georg Ritschl is back in South Africa after his nearly two month incarceration in Mozambique for performing planetary energy work on the Zambezi river without government sanction. And he is still smiling...