ARCHITECTURE
Inside Thomas Chapman’s Local Studio
If you think that a young architecture studio selfpublishing a beautiful hard-covered coffee-table book featuring its first 12 projects couldn’t be anything but an exercise in in vanity, in most cases you’d be right. But in the case of Hustles by young Joburg architect and urbanist Thomas Chapman, the project doesn’t seem at all cocky. Local Studio, which Chapman founded just six years ago when he was still in his 20s, might just have won a Design Vanguard Award — an international award for emerging architects around the world run by US architectural magazine, Architectural Record — but this book isn’t about self-celebration. Rather, it’s a bit of a protest, and a bit of a hustle itself to change the way we look at the buildings and the city, and maybe, in so doing, hustle a little bit more space for architects, who seem to have lost ground in the business of designing our cities.
Chapman writes about “the lobotomy of the architectural profession in South Africa”, by which I understand him to be referring to its cringing subservience and willingness to sign most of what Chapman considers the “primary defining factors of compelling architecture” over to private property developers.
He also talks about the initially hopeful civic projects that he’s been involved in, which have been characterised by “massive overspending in areas with little development in order to create vote-winning short-term construction jobs”, and subsequently neglected and allowed to fall into disrepair.
The whole approach of the book is about laying bare a bit of this context, and capturing something of the hustle involved in Local Studio’s early projects in a way that not only portrays our built environment in a different light, but also tries to tell the truth about what architecture has become in Joburg, and what it takes to operate within the twin poles of private and public development.
Sure, it is fairly conventionally structured around a dozen featured buildings, which Chapman has had photographed, but that’s where the conventional stuff ends.
To start with, the way the buildings have been photographed represents a radical approach to looking at architecture. Chapman collaborated with photographer David Southwood on the book. Southwood is highly respected in his field as an architectural photographer, and many big commercial firms hire him to photograph their completed buildings. But his approach in this book was different.
In an unintentionally hilarious anecdote in his introduction, Southwood recounts an early meeting with Chapman and a car journey to look at some of the studio’s
‘I like photographing architecture, but I much prefer photographing scenes which embed the built form into the street and render the structure as a continuum of its context …’ — Dave Southwood
Chapman said at the book launch, with a nod to the modernist master Mies van der Rohe, that his buildings are more often called interesting than good
projects. In the car on the way, he recalls blurting out a sentence “something like” this: “I like photographing architecture, but I much prefer photographing scenes which embed the built form into the street and render the structure as a continuum of its context …” It goes on ... maybe it’s an elevator pitch he’s rehearsed a few times and it rolls off the tongue — but that fragment is nevertheless a pretty good summation of his approach.
He photographs the buildings in this book as part of the city, when most of the time the job of an architectural photographer is to eliminate as much of the context as possible — to celebrate architects’ creations in splendid isolation.
You get all the messy details — telephone wire and street lights, people and all nature of rubbish and debris and building sites, traffic and litter and signage. You see the life in and around the building not as a definitive representation, but as a moment in a constant stream of other moments.
Not only is this a much more interesting way of looking at buildings than the images of looming glass facades or pristine interiors we’re used to, but it is appropriate to Local Studio’s approach. Their architecture is more often about the spaces around buildings — the streets, the city they’re in, and probably most important of all, for the people who live there — than about the building as an object in itself.
Much of Local Studio’s aesthetic draws on what Chapman thinks of as the highveld’s “second tier of vernacular architecture”, which is the fast, effective industrial architecture that sprang up with the mines and the rapid growth of the city at its inception. So he references the exposed steel structures, the sawtoothed roofs and the corrugated iron. You’ll see hints of these elements in their community centres in Hillbrow, the café at Constitution Hill, a pedestrian bridge in Westbury, a school in Tsakane and the studio’s own office in Brixton.
There’s a pragmatic dimension to this aesthetic too — to get done what he wanted to achieve during this phase of his career, Chapman had to work quickly and cheaply. He refers to “promoting the concept of ephemerality” and making a concerted attempt to jettison the styles and approaches derivative of US and European traditions that are most common in Joburg’s architectural landscape (and which tend to make South African architecture look like a poor reflection of something that’s done properly overseas).
If I have one criticism of the book, it’s that there aren’t more direct anecdotes of the sort that represent the hustle behind the projects, because, apart from the way they reveal what it’s really like working as an architect in this city, they’re a fascinating portrait of the forces that create the streets we live in. For example, for one of his projects — a community centre in Hillbrow — Chapman had to build rapidly with about R2.5m of soon-to-expire lottery grant money, which ran out before he could add the finishing touch of an outside deck and roof garden. He approached the owners of various buildings in the area, and raised money among them to complete it in exchange for the right to use the building’s roof garden. The budget for the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre in Sophiatown also ran out before he could complete his idea for a mesh sun screen that doubled up as an abstracted memorial map on which people could attach small plaques indicating where they remember living before the forced removals. That one he crowd-funded. But there must be more and juicier stories of Chapman’s hustles behind his architectural interventions in the cityscape.
Chapman said at the book launch, with a nod to the modernist master Mies van der Rohe, that his buildings are more often called interesting than good. If that’s the chief virtue of this phase of his career, what is most interesting about Hustles is the faith it shows in a book to affect the way architecture is practised. Apart from being a fascinating portrait of the city of the kind you’re unlikely to see anywhere else, Hustles is also an attempt to wrestle back some mind-space for architects to make a real difference in a city like Joburg. Architecture can be done differently, and that starts with seeing buildings and cities differently.