Creating order out of Jozi’s chaos
JOHANNESBURG architecture firm, Local Studio, has launched its first book chronicling the firm’s first 12 built projects and five years of practice in the City of Gold.
The book, titled Hustles, documents the buildings designed and built by the firm, founded by Thomas Chapman in 2012.
Co-authored by Chapman and photographer David Southwood, with illustrations by Michael Tymbios, Hustles was launched earlier this month in Braamfontein.
Hustles reveals the work of Local Studio in vivid snapshots, diagrams, essays and interviews – from chaotic Hillbrow to the arid landscape of Tsakane, with Westbury, Brixton and Braamfontein in between.
Local Studio works mainly in the affordable housing, social infrastructure and public space sectors and is responsible for several projects that have played a part in the regeneration of downtown Johannesburg.
The importance of the urban context is a strong theme that runs throughout the book.
As David Southwood writes: “It’s very unusual to have an architect give the sense that buildings grow out of the street – normally one is presented with an edifice, and the relationship to the street is a mumbled afterthought.” Southwood describes the context of Johannesburg as “…hard to understand, difficult to work in, and most often ignored”.
Local Studio is seen not only to take urban context into consideration but also the notion of urban place making.
Chapman defines the word “place” as: “The art of merging an area’s defining natural attributes with a grid of manmade infrastructure, facilitating convenience and dignity for human beings when they are most vulnerable, namely, while on foot.”
The reader will be exposed to one of the first new social infrastructure projects to be built in Hillbrow since the 1970s; a modern interpretation of a traditional Sophiatown building typology, a steel restaurant pavilion built as a temporary structure on the foundations of a demolished lunatic asylum; a bridge, a school, offices, housing and more.
Chapman, who not only runs a practice, but also teaches at the University of Johannesburg, says it was not easy to find the time to write a book.
Chapman’s intention with this first publication was to describe an architecture practice’s journey, one that saw a lot of “hustling” to achieve its destination of “an architectural product that is present, engaged, hopeful and, ultimately, never boring”.
With Masters degrees in Architecture (2008) and Urban Design (2013) from the University of the Witwatersrand, he has conducted research into the reintroduction of “publicness” in the post-apartheid city. Chapman joined Silvio Rech and Lesley Carstens as a professional architect in 2009 and founded Local Studio in Brixton, Johannesburg, in 2012.
Today, the firm employs 15 full-time staff and has a diverse portfolio of built work comprising public buildings, urban design schemes and private houses.
Southwood is a photographer who concerns himself with the medium’s production and consumption, human rights and documentary’s outer limits. His photos can be viewed at Iziko: South African National Gallery, the Finnish Museum of Photography, Christoph Merian Stiftung, the collection of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, Goethe-Institut, the Spier Art Collection, and private collections in South Africa and abroad.
For more information go to: https://www.localstudio.co.za/