Apartheid politics and architecture in South Africa

Abstract

With the institutionalization of Apartheid in 1948, and the enactment of laws thereafter, South African architects were required to give substance to this ideology in their designs. This article covers early examples of public architecture which were not located in the townships, but in the established urban areas, where the segregation of facilities by race was taken up by architects as a functional planning challenge. These works have no iconographic base, but the paths of movement through the buildings imbed Apartheid perniciousness in their plans. Like other sections of white South African society, to many architects operating in such racially structured context, discrimination became an insouciant practice.