African Identity in Post-Apartheid Public Architecture

In this valuable contribution to the scholarship of post-apartheid architecture, Noble playfully inverts the title of Frantz Fanon's seminal anti-colonial text Black Skin, White Masks (1952). With this theoretical lens, the author investigates architectural authenticity and identity in five prominent public architecture projects since 1994. These projects carry the exceptional mandate of embodying the political hopes of the new South Africa: to be a pluralist, democratic, and open nation. The more successful of the five speak not only to their respective cities and provinces, and to the South African nation; they can also be seen as major exemplars of a wider movement towards a modern African aesthetic. Noble's work, the first to compare these projects, can also be seen alongside the growing and important body of writing about cities in contemporary South Africa, in which, most interestingly, Achille Mbembe puts forward the idea of the ‘African Modern’. One of the book's chief merits is Noble's detailed presentation of his original research into the design competitions for each project. Comparing the winning schemes against failed ones, the text provides a rich insight into the values and priorities of the public officials, jury members, and architects responsible for the final outcomes. Noble's exposition also illustrates the determined but sometimes fraught efforts to integrate South Africa's new democratic expectations into the design process.

Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Democracy · Identity (music) · Mandate · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Visual arts · White (mutation) · Architecture · Gender Studies · Law · South African History and Culture

• Contemporary planning and emergent futures

  Open Access•Alan Mabin, Philip Harrison•Progress in Planning•2023

  Add to list