InCommon: The Possibilities of Collective Space
The WITS School of Architecture and Planning (SoAP) hosted the exhibition ‘InCommon: The Possibilities of Collective Space’, which ran from the 20th of February right up until the University closed due to the nation-wide lockdown on the 26th of March 2020. The exhibition was opened with a lecture and discussion in the Dorothy Susskind Auditorium at SoAP, presented by Bob van Bebber (Director at Boogertman + Partners / FuturePart), Nisha van der Hoven (FuturePart), and Britt Bailey (FuturePart). The collaborators of the exhibition include: the School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand; Bob van Bebber; Nisha van der Hoven; Justus van der Hoven; Sally Gaule; Marcus van der Hoven; and Alexandra Gascoigne.
Opening SoAP’s Theory and Practice Series for 2020, the InCommon exhibition, curated by multidisciplinary research studio FuturePart, and Boogertman + Partners, raised design challenges concerning the idea of 'the common' in architecture and urban design, where society becomes the common resource that we try to create by living together. Design as an experimental realm, is a search for possibilities for how we live, and is ultimately answerable to society.
The idea of the common implies collective rather than private ownership, where space becomes a resource for the public. It is also the body of knowledge, techniques and common experiences of collective production for practitioners in the built environment. By placing the InCommon exhibition within a School of Architecture, the idea of the common was explored in the sense of a shared experience between theory, practice, and the public: in this case being visitors to SoAP and WITS, students, staff, and members of the architectural and planning professions. When ‘practice’ is brought into the university, as the institution responsible for producing the next generation of designers and thinkers, this provides shared expertise to the process of reproducing knowledge relevant to society. This is an extremely rich alliance and partnership between the innovators of pedagogy, the practitioners involved in design application to real-world projects, and the students themselves who benefit from the embedding of practice within theory. While the design process can never be turned into a recipe, and therefore cannot be prescriptively taught, it can be theorised, innovated, and applied: the exhibition platform is an important one in presenting a record of real-world application and the packaging of these in narrative form. The six cabinets designed by Marcus van der Hoven and containing selected projects, are structured around the following questions derived from the FuturePart and Boogertman + Partners’ collaborative practice and research process:
- How does art move you?
- How can you design play?
- What is the new narrative?
- Where do you draw the line?
- Where is the new public platform?
- How can we design in nature?
Exhibited along the entire length of the western wall of SoAP’s John Moffat Foyer, the photography of Sally Gaule, professional photographer and lecturer at SoAP, documented scenes of Johannesburg, capturing habitual practice and the intuitive response of people in their everyday lives, with their social habits and customs, as they negotiate the city through their common-sense approaches. The images reveal paradoxical attempts at managing territory around public buildings in the city through security measures and barriers, the irony being that through the eroding of the ‘common’ as a home for the collective, the true basis for security, publicness, traditions and innovations is undermined, when excessive security measures remove personal freedoms and restrict dialogue. The exhibition brings this confrontation between the management of space and the protection of participation in society, to the fore.
This public bench and sculpture, designed by Bob van Bebber (Director of Boogertman + Partners), which has transformed the John Moffat Foyer for so many weeks, has been graciously donated to SoAP.
UnCommon: The Challenges of Isolated Space
The day before the national lockdown in response to COVID-19 in South Africa, already working from various home offices across Johannesburg, an online panel discussion was held between the collaborators of the exhibition: the Head of School (SoAP) Professor Nnamdi Elleh, Patricia Theron (SoAP), the curators Bob van Bebber, Nisha van der Hoven, and Justus van der Hoven, and was facilitated by Glenda Venn. This discussion entitled ‘UnCommon: The Challenges of Isolated Space’ reflected on the contents of the exhibition in a time of 'self-isolation' and 'social distancing'.
UnCommon is a reaction to an exceptional circumstance, which is nevertheless now common to all of us. It is the ‘counter image’ of the common, with requirement for isolation and distance from society, which is taken as a reflective position from which to review the same six questions posed by the exhibition. We face a new experience, with a new set of rules and behavioral norms now imposed by the state. It seems essential in these circumstances to maintain our common dialogue and sensibility. If the common is that realm that can bring together multiple and even opposite perspectives to productive resolution, then it is through this means that society will be strengthened.
We reflect on the six questions that come together in a new way, in view of the recent transformation of our experience which the present moment has effected. As whole communities temporarily must abandon their habits, their rituals, their traditions, where do we find the ‘common’, which is the world that people may experience together?
The conversation can be viewed here on the FuturePart website.
Student and Staff Outreach Project at SoAP
Please follow the link to our outreach project: SoAP’s Call For Papers: REFLECTIONS ON COVID-19: “SOCIAL DISTANCING” & “SELF-ISOLATION”, which asks all students and staff of SoAP to submit essays describing one of the most significant experiences of our time, a situation which connects all of us while many are obligated to stay home and apart to protect our society. We ask the question: as lecturers and students in the fields of planning and architectural education, and whose interest is in making spaces and places for people, how should we understand “social distancing” and “self-isolation?”