Jeremy Rose: Obsessive, acclaimed architect
1963-2015
JEREMY Rose, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 52, was the architect behind some of South Africa’s most famous museum, heritage and public-art projects commemorating the struggle against apartheid.
These include Freedom Park, the Mandela House Visitors Centre, the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, the Apartheid Museum, the Liliesleaf Liberation Centre in Rivonia and the Mandela Capture Site public sculpture.
He was also principal architect for parts of the Newtown cultural precinct in Johannesburg, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls and the Origins Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Rose was born in Johannesburg on May 24 1963. He matriculated at the private Anglican school of St Martin’s and studied architecture at Wits. He was treasurer of the National Union of South African Students, and an active member of the End Conscription Campaign.
Rose went into exile in Botswana in 1989 to avoid conscription into the South African Defence Force and jail time for refusing the call-up. While there he worked with Osmond Lange Architects and then in association with Colin Savage.
He returned to South Africa in 1995 and formed Mashabane Rose Associates with Phill Mashabane.
Rose was very driven, very ambitious and very true to a specific architectural vision.
He had clear ideas about the type of aesthetic he wished to create. He was not as client-orientated as many architects.
He considered himself a visionary and thought he knew better than anybody else, including his colleagues and clients, with whom he had many robust arguments.
He was very stubborn, determined to execute his own aesthetic, down to the smallest detail. He knew precisely how he wanted things to look, and how he wanted space to operate.
He had a profound understanding of inside-outside space relationships. All of this, including his obsessive focus on detail, can be seen to good effect in the Apartheid Museum, which, along with others of his designs, won international praise and was written about in several books and papers.
A striking feature of the Apartheid Museum is the clean acoustics, which allow an unusually neat and clear experience.
Other museums are marred by a profusion of sounds overflowing from adjacent exhibits. At the Apartheid Museum, the demarcation from one
PERSONAL VISION: The details on the major projects architect Jeremy Rose worked on were, for him, non-negotiable exhibit to the next is clear, and the resultant experience all the more stark and harrowing for it.
Rose was a very good painter, draughtsman and sculptor, talents he used to great effect in his designs.
He had a natural flair for materials and was exquisitely selective about which ones he used.
While his detailing was admired by other architects, it was not always appreciated by his colleagues.
For him the details were non-negotiable. He wanted them correct and this made him a bit of a control freak.
He was so obsessed with his personal vision of how things should look that some of the architects who worked under him found him overbearing and not respectful of their vision.
Rose lost some good staff over the years for failing to incorporate, acknowledge or credit their ideas.
Because he worked with government stakeholders a lot of the time, he had to tolerate committee-type deliberations and consensus decisions. He found this way of doing things frustrating and became increasingly impatient with it.
As he stamped his mark over time, his impatience and dominance became more respected, which in turn made him even less tolerant of challenges to his vision.
Rose died of genetically inherited pulmonary fibrosis, which also killed his father Eric, who died in 1987 at a similar age.
He is survived by his estranged wife Ellen Papciak-Rose, their daughter Maya and his partner Mary Wafer.
He met Papciak in Botswana where she was a Peace Corps volunteer art teacher. She returned to the US five years ago with their daughter.
Having carved a name for himself as the maker of cultural and historical museums in the South African context, Rose felt he could not leave.
He went to the US every six months to see Maya. — Chris Barron
At the Apartheid Museum, the demarcation from one exhibit to the next is clear, and the resultant experience all the more stark and harrowing for it