Johannesburg is the geographic center of the 11 official languages of South Africa, and it was the pivotal site of the 1976 student uprisings. Young students marched and protested the mandatory use of Afrikaans in elementary and high schools. These events marked the moment South Africa began to turn towards meaningful democracy. My Thesis is a response to, and manifestation of, my reading of South African history and the transformations of the city of Johannesburg. I envisioned an urban campus built to promote the many languages of South Africa, and to confront the past by using the site of an apartheid-era courthouse.
My project, then, uses the program of multiplicity of languages and democracy to rewrite a section of the city – specifically the four-block walled Magistrate’s Court – into a response that deals with both architectural and social forces. The project is premised on sabotaging the courthouse by extending one of the original boundaries of the mining-camp through the site as a cut, which inverts the structure’s mass-void relationship. The fortress-like exterior walls, slabs, and roof are erased, and the light-wells inside the mega-block become conspicuous individual structures. The opposition created by the leftover fragment of the original building, and its exposed interior light-wells, creates a dialog about the tension surrounding identity in South Africa’s post-apartheid era: dealing with an authoritarian past (the courthouse) while trying to introduce liberty (the free-plan campus).
Within the armatures of the smaller structures, the campus holds many programs, such as libraries, classrooms and theaters. The bulk of the original fragment becomes a place of broader dissemination of languages, through a publishing house, as well as film, TV and recording studios. I took the strategy of opening and creating multiplicity through many scales, particularly in the library towers of the campus. There, the sizes of the windows were considered to drop a shadow of light inwards as individual platforms for reading. Through the kaleidoscopic multitude of spaces, a library of Babel emerges: all 11 languages and all books become synchronic, as all of the books in the libraries are held open on reading stands placed opposite the windows. In my project I hoped to find a way to use strategies I found in an urban context to foster multiplicity in a community.