Erik Laubscher and Claude Bouscharain Trust
Cape Town
2022
Typology
Interiors
Art Spaces
Furniture
Heritage
Built
Programme
Exhibition
City
Cape Town
Country
South Africa
Status
Completed
Awards
Erik Laubscher and Claude Bouscharain were both significant South African modern artists. Apart from their work in public and private collections, they left a considerable legacy of paintings, drawings, prints and less formal legacy of their artistic lives - easels, brushes, books, built-in furniture, and things they did not want to throw away. This project provides a permanent home for those things.
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We were commissioned by the Curator of the Estate, on behalf of the trustees, to design a home for all these things and for the foundation which seeks to ensure that the legacy of their creativity partnership is maintained. The resulting project is a small but complex interior fi t out within a large mixed-use building. The shell had been designed as a restaurant and had a second life as a legal practice. What it off ered was a central location and security, but also importantly, a set of big sliding doors opening to a covered space good for larger events than could be accommodated indoors. It is a hybrid space, part gallery, part boardroom, part art storage unit.
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The available space was long, narrow and irregular in outline, with rather randomly placed structural elements punching through it along a diagonal line. Our response was to accept the diagonal emphasis, and draw the longest line through the space with a floating light-beam. To one side of this, a set of extremely large sliding walls serve as hanging space, and as lockable doors to a storage rack designed to take paintings of many shapes and sizes. This is designed to be a sculpture in its own right, visible only on occasion. To the other side, three “rooms” in enfi lade are formed, one for display, one for display and discussion, and, towards the rear a more intimate space for reading,conversation, and contemplation.
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The architecture plays minimalist sobriety against bold colour. I first saw Laubscher’s work in quantity at an exhibition curated by the client, who had chosen to show the work on coloured walls so I knew she would be open to the use of colour. Laubscher’s landscape play perspectival depth against planes of colour which push and pull towards and away from the eye, layers of space stacked up one behind the other. That is the real idea at work in this set of spaces. I Trust that Erik and Claude would have approved, as did their children when they fi nally saw the spaces furnished and filled.
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