Review: African Identity in Post-Apartheid Public Architecture: White Skin, Black Masks, by Jonathan Alfred Noble and At Home with Apartheid: The Hidden Landscapes of Domestic Service in Johannesburg, by Rebecca Ginsburg

Abstract

Jonathan Alfred Noble African Identity in Post-Apartheid Public Architecture: White Skin, Black Masks Farnham, UK, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2011, 314 pp., 135 b/w illus. Cloth, $124.95, ISBN 9780754677659 Rebecca Ginsburg At Home with Apartheid: The Hidden Landscapes of Domestic Service in Johannesburg Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011, 248 pp., 37 b/w illus. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 9780813928883 It can be argued that nowhere during the twentieth century were the spatial dimensions of politics more nakedly visible than in South Africa. Even before the official adoption in 1948 of apartheid and its detailed laws governing racial classification and segregation, the South African state enforced policies of forcible resettlement and restricted movement aimed at ensuring strict separation of its population. The built environment played a key role in establishing racial identities and maintaining segregated spheres, and the legacy of this social rupture remains clearly visible in the architecture, cities, and landscapes of South Africa. Two important new books by Jonathan Alfred Noble and Rebecca Ginsburg add significantly to our understanding of the design disciplines’ relationships to apartheid. Noble and Ginsburg explore the spatial dimensions of South African politics from very different perspectives. The former analyzes specific examples of state-sponsored architecture designed to represent a fully integrated, post-apartheid society, while the latter examines domestic spaces in middle-class Johannesburg during the 1960s and 1970s in order to study closely apartheid’s concerns with gender, labor, movement, and visibility. Both books are rooted in the extensive research of their authors’ doctoral dissertations and make significant contributions to the growing body of literature on the built environment in modern South Africa. Noble examines five projects built since the end of apartheid in great depth in African Identity in Post-Apartheid Public Architecture . The diversity of architectural expression he discusses reflects the broad range of concerns driving South African architecture and landscape architecture. Most important among these is the question of how to represent a pluralistic, post-apartheid democracy and its multitude of regional cultures, geographies, and climates. Noble highlights the importance of design competitions in South Africa, which he portrays as a democratization of the design process analogous to the country’s political reforms. The author, …