Signal Road Bo Kaap
Cape Town
2019
Typology
Houses
Heritage
Programme
Residential
City
Cape Town
Country
South Africa
Status
Completed
Awards
This is a small project engaging with a larger landscape of ideas and things. The initial brief was simple, a home office for the owner who works from home, which can also work as a guest room for family and friends from far afield. The buildings are materially simple, but the spaces within, and the places between are experientially complex. More complex still was the planning and heritage issues, which had resulted in five years of fruitless effort by a variety of architects to gain planning approval.
The new work was built on top of two existing spaces, a garage and a bedroom, making the most of the views towards the city and the mountains. From the front door of the old cottage one moves through the existing living spaces and out into a small courtyard. A stair tucked into the narrow space between the garage and a broad fin column rises half a level to a second court containing a swimming pool. A light , open steel stair climbs along the wall next to the pool to a roof terrace , which has a wooden bleacher/bench facing Table Mountain like a grandstand for watching the tablecloth and acting as the last half flight of stairs to a steel bridge wich ends in a covered porch. A window opening in the wall is divided between inside and outside, framing the tall buildings of downtown, a cityscape. At last inside, a shuttered window looks across the street towards other houses with similar windows, an intimate view of the neighbourhood. Turning away from the street , and opening the corner windows transforms the bay window into a belvedere, tightly framing a panorama over Scotsche Kloof, the valley in which the heart of the Bo Kaap rests towards Kloof Neck and the setting sun.
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The building was approved without planning departures, it tries to fit itself discretely into the fabric, it presents an ordinary face to the street, whilst opening out to the landscape at the rear, where its openness is hidden from the street. The language is gauged to achieve a certain anonymity without indulging in pastiche. The old and new walls are not distinguished from one another in material, they are all made of the same thing, in the same way, but openings within and between them ae made very differently The windows show what is old,( wooden sash), what is in between (existing horizontally modulated steel frames) and what is new (aluminium frames with opening corners or glass to glass junctions. Floors are in situ concrete, lined with timber internally and externally, and the roof is a folded plane, plasterboard internally, steel sheeting externally, wrapped by a parapet which is horizontal where it addresses the street, and dips away towards a giant steel scupper which talks about catching the rain, which is stored in a bank of tanks in the garage. The single existing circular widow is left in place as a remnant or a fragment of an arbitrary decision made in the past.
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The double faced street facade is painted blue, but the colour gives way to white as it turns the corner, differentiating the graphic, planar street wall architecture from the more sculptural courtyard architecture - acknowledging that a building needs to work as a surface making urban space, a public world, before it makes a private one.
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The project addresses the difference between public and private, inner and outer, heritage and innovation, stereotomic and tectonic in a careful manner. It is both ordinary and performing ordinariness, switching from one mode to the other as it turns from the neighbourhood street towards the city and changing again as it turns in on its private space. The resulting house is a small village, three buildings clusterd together around the most important spaces- the “in between” courtyards, the “on top“ terraces and the “inside outside” porticos - it is an intensely urban house.
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The image of the building flickers between the dumbly figurative anthropormorphism of the existing house and a more personal set of references. It could be seen as a cyclops, as cross eyed, as referrinf to Le Corbusiers early obsession with houses with bridges, or Adolf Loos’s assertion that the well dressed person is the one dressed most anonymously, or with Venturi’s fire stations, where the figuration is the thickness of a coat of paint. All of these themes areof course present in the early work of Siza, before he became himself. What is really at work or at play is making a house which pays very close attention to its context , including a series of heritage controls which preclude the possibility of an honest expression of the material conditions of the present- which in short propose the worst form of a historical kitsch as “authenticity”.
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