Projects - Page 3 of 5 - Wolff Architects

The Cheré Botha School was commissioned by the Provincial Government of the Western Cape for learners on the autism spectrum and with intellectual disabilities. The school will accommodate learners from the ages of 3 -18.

In South Africa, many special educational needs schools are conglomerations of classrooms strung along a central corridor. The need for enclosed corridors originate from the susceptibility of many of these learners to respiratory diseases. The persistent wind and winter rainfall of Cape Town makes open courtyard typologies inappropriate for this kind of school. The result then, is that no collectivity is established beyond the classroom. Although learners with autism and ones with intellectual disabilities are taught in separate classrooms it is mutually beneficial for the learners to play and interact together. The search for collective form therefore serves an educational and developmental purpose as well.

The horizontality of the canopy around the arrival court is contrasted with the verticality of the A-frame structures and the hall. The sculptural volumes of the hall and workshops with its characteristic roof profile are the central moments of the architectural composition. These two volumes are clad in corrugated iron and rise like cumulus clouds from the datum of the canopy at their base. The interior of the hall is triangulated in section just like the A-framed spaces. As another triangulated space, the hall becomes an exaggerated version of other collective forms. Openings for light are carefully arranged to ensure a low glare interior.

The architecture of this school engages with the speculations of Fumihiko Maki on the nature of collective form. Maki’s speculations focused on the design of authentic urban patterns which respond to the lifestyle, terrain, urban economies and contemporary challenges of societies or urban districts. The character and coherence of villages which developed over long periods of time served for Maki as a benchmark of significant collective form at an urban scale.

The school is divided into six sections: an administration building, four classroom blocks for learners and divided into various age groups and including one classroom block with the assembly hall, a kitchen and workshops. Each of the classroom blocks is designed around a shared space which is expressed through a timber A-frame, which we have conceptualised as the ‘super-form’. The A-frame ‘super-form’ is identical for every age group but the ground surface is occupied and programmed differently depending on its situation: the creche is filled with play equipment and soft surfaces, the junior sections with lines for walking and riding and in the senior section, vocational situations such as food production or hospitality are set up. These roofed, outdoor spaces establish collective form as a series of social spaces at a scale between the classroom and the school as a whole. It allows learners to play and learn outside even in adverse weather conditions. In previous projects, we have explored the use of roofed, outdoor spaces as expressions of collective form such as in the Watershed located in Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront. In these explorations, collective form becomes the social heart of the architecture and the origin of urban connectivity.

Models built during the development of the timber frame enclosing the communal space

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Section through classrooms and communal space

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Light study model of communal space between classrooms

Site plan

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Hall

Light study model of the hall interior

Beyond the hall is an exercise court, which again is articulated by a horizontal canopy on three sides and open to the neighbourhood on the fourth, except this time it has an incredible view over the landscape to the mountains in the distance. Two generous stairs lead users from the court to the sport field below.

pumflet – art, architecture and stuff is serial publication co-founded with artist Kemang Wa Lehulere. The publication seeks to connect architectural spaces with cultural and social practices of the imagination. “Daar gaan die Alabama’ was the first iteration of the project. The project was conceptualised as a public intervention around the history and demolition in 1984 of an old city cinema. We discovered that the film was interrupted in order for bulldozers to proceed with demolition. The intervention included: the re-screening of the interrupted film on the pavement where the old cinema once stood; the display of newspaper clippings in the corner shop that now occupies the site; and the publication of Pumflet, a set of letter exchanges dwelling on the events surrounding the demolition.

See more images of the event here.

All photos by Barry Christianson.

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark

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The scenography that we designed for this exhibition focuses on the concept of reflexivity. The content of the exhibition, curated by the museum, focuses on six African cities, Lagos, Kinshasa, Maputo, Dakar, Johannesburg and Nairobi. In the context of a renewed interest in exhibitions on African architecture in Europe it is worth asking whether a bidirectional relationship of learning and entertainment is fostered in such displays. African scholars such as Chinua Achebe have argued that there has been a long relationship between Africa and Europe, where Africa has been a mirror for European self-definition.

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In designing the scenography, the attempt was to make a space that bends back on itself; a space that confronts the viewer with his or her own gaze. In this exhibition, each city is contained in an interleading “cell”. By shaping a voided cell for each city, a scalloped solid form is left as residue. This form aims to subvert predetermined relationships between viewer and subject by inserting a void into the solid form which sets up confrontations with the other and the self.

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The central void has an entrance which is articulated as a display box. In the entrance and on the balcony, the viewer is on display as much as the content of the exhibition is. In short, we gave the walls eyes. The balcony is in the wall facing the entrance into the gallery. The exhibition wall and balcony sets up an ambiguity; on the one hand it is a display surface, on the other hand it contains a gaze. People on the balcony will be looking at people who have just entered and see themselves reflected in a golden mirror wall facing them. The relationship between subject and object is inverted. This construct of reciprocal gazes is important in reflecting on the potential for an ‘us and them’reading of the African cities on display. The scenography creates a reflexive construct between content, others and the self.

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This design demonstrates how an educational institution can show leadership in the formation of the city that would serve interests beyond those of the proposed business incubator alone. Instead of locating the business incubator in a portion of the existing industrial shed (as required in the brief), we proposed a new street throughout the entire shed that sets up an urban pedestrian network which connects several popular areas around the shed. The street reclaims public space which is of a bigger order than the business incubator. Although the street is enacted by the business incubator project, it becomes a device for creating economic opportunity for small businesses; a market.

The large numbers of passing traffic in the street and the popularity of the event space and the business incubator results in a constant flow of people through the street from early in the morning until late at night. This pedestrian flow sets up extremely good commercial opportunities. Instead of giving such opportunity to one or two big tenants, the market was devised as many micro tenancies which allow small and emerging businesses to take advantage of the commercial opportunity. This commercial pattern was learnt from studying street based business in various urban situations. It is fundamental, in the context of unjustifiable inequality in South Africa, that big business should establish themselves in the city in a manner that sets up opportunity or benefits for smaller businesses. This project shows how this can be done.

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The aim of the project was to increase the intensity and diversity of human interactions in the city. To achieve this, a market, an exhibition venue, some rentable office spaces and green spaces were added to the program. These activities were concentrated along a street which connects to a larger urban network. Perpendicular to the street, a 50 x 50m steel floor hovers over the market with huge openings in the floor that makes interaction between the levels possible. The top floor is a series of mezzanines which are open to the main suspended floor.

by Dave Southwood (6)

To keep the focus on the street rather than the individual stalls, they were designed for the tenants to customise and transform as they want. The urbanity cannot be contingent on a fragile architecture.

A reciprocity is set up architecturally between the small businesses in the market and the developing businesses in the incubator. For each to watch the activities of the other daily, is educational and stimulating. Both can learn from each other. The business incubator is defined architecturally, not by facades that communicate an appearance, but rather by the suspended floor that makes opportunity below it. This floor also becomes the site for social interaction within an institution that focusses on innovation; a cafe in the centre of the business incubator becomes a social hub for the institution. Socialisation is seen as central to the exchange of ideas and making contact with new people.

by Dave Southwood (12)

This project was developed in an existing industrial shed which was originally the electrical repair workshops of the drydock in the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront. The steel frame of the shed contained a gantry crane with gantry rails and lattice columns. The refurbishment of the shed relied on the opportunity offered by the additional structure required for the gantry crane; the 50 x 50m steel floor was suspended off the gantry structure rather than supported from the ground. The large scale A braces which gave lateral stability to the gantry rail were used to mark significant public spaces in the building.

The site for this house is on a farm deep in the Cederberg mountains in South Africa, a landscape dense with biodiversity of the Cape Floristic Region.

The setting for the house was determined by three factors, firstly a ‘bald ’spot in the vegetation was selected (in consultation with botanists) to minimise the impact of the house on the flora.

Secondly, since the clients prefer to live outdoors as far as possible, “rooms” were found in the natural landscape which could accommodate outdoor cooking and eating, living and sleeping. The built part of the house facilitates living in the unbuilt part of the house.

Thirdly, the setting was determined by its ability to compose a view from that specific location; the architects believe that a distant view is not rich enough a view and should be supplemented by articulate landscape features in the foreground and the middleground. For instance, the selected site has rocky ridges right in front of the primary view to the north that creates a defined edge to the space of the house without needing any built means to achieve such a boundary.

The house should be fireproof and baboon proof, as the area is prone to periodical bush fires and troops of baboons which raid houses for food and will tamper with anything unsturdy which can be grabbed. However, the greatest challenge of the project is to see the site back in our office, 250km away. With no marks of human life on site, (fences, electricity poles, building, etc.) it became very difficult to judge the scale of landscape features. To make matters worse, conventional land surveying produces contour plans that describe the topography only with no ability to describe the plethora of rocks and bush. To design the building we had to develop a way to see the vegetation, rocks and topography simultaneously. The solution was to have the landscape scanned with a 3D scanner, producing a Point Cloud. Instead of following the conventional route of using these scans to produce solid surfaces, we developed ways of using the Point Cloud in its raw state to have the scale and character of the entire natural world present, while we design.

To minimise the visual impact, the house will be built of a material which is identical in colour to the rocks around it; all exterior walls of the blocks are built of fairface cement brick, made with 70% recycled concrete. The brick exterior is necessary to protect the house from bush fires.
The interiors of rooms are plastered and painted white. All floors are made with polished paving brick with no concrete surface beds. The ceilings are made with South African Pine beams and floorboards, which gives a dominant yellow colour to the interior.

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The farm is within the winter rainfall area of South Africa, with cold winters and very hot summers. A constant Westerly wind comes down the valley and can sometimes be quite harsh. To protect the house against this wind the house was sited next to a rocky cliff to the West. The Western edge of the house was designed to screen the wind from the balcony.

A large overhang on the Northern side provides protection from the summer sun. The double brick walls to the North do the same job. All the rooms have shutters on the inside of the windows to insulate the openings. Low E glass was used in the living and dining room.

The house has no connection to any outside services; electricity is generated by solar power and stored in batteries for all year round use, water is supplied from a borehole and sewerage is contained on site to protect the vegetation from nutrient rich effluent. The technology used to achieve this was purposefully concealed as we believe that “sustainable” architecture and the aesthetic expressions of “sustainability” are separate matters.

To further minimise the visual impact of the house, the program was split into three separate blocks, containing bedrooms, bathrooms and the kitchen. The living and dining room is conceived of as an enclosed ‘courtyard’between the blocks. The fragmentation of the building mass mimics the broken up rock cliffs around it.

In a landscape where there are no marks of human intervention, it is hard to judge the scale of anything. Scalelessness was therefore used as a primary characteristic of the architecture; all conventional external building elements (roofs, downpipes, windows, etc.) were concealed to deprive the observer of anything to judge the scale by. This was achieved by making a double wall on each of the short sides of the blocks which allows openings to be cut into the exterior in the massive brick alone. All openings in the exterior envelope were exaggerated in size to diminish the apparent scale of the building from a distance.

Design something the world will never forget. Something that will be associated with Cape Town forever after. Something temporary.” That was the brief that Wolff Architects received for a structure to celebrate Cape Town as the World Design Capital in 2014.

The response was a halo of light, 100m in diameter, that will appear on New Year’s Eve above Lion’s Head. It is an enigmatic device, that celebrates the landscape that defines Cape Town. It is also a gentle satire on the reverence that people have for Table Mountain.

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As a structure it is more permanent than fireworks and more movable than the Eiffel Tower. The halo has the potential to be used as an instrument of cultural diplomacy; the City of Cape Town can send or lend it to places and events to celebrate, valorise, question or ridicule. As an incomplete object, the halo requires a site of particular meaning and a moment of revelation. It could be suspended over the Giardini in Venice for the Biennale, Maracanã Football Stadium in Rio for the Soccer World Cup or even the United Nations headquarters in New York during an important decision.

The halo is a time and site specific event, a composite piece that adds meaning and emotion to a place and time. The tensegrity structure of the halo can be supported in various ways which allows adaptation to various sites. Although this project is site specific, it can be specific to various sites. It can be celebratory or political, rooted or intrusive, comforting or critical. As a composite piece, it constructs alternative meanings. Even when removed, the halo leaves an afterimage in which the absence is as memorable as its presence.

Chicago Halo

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This project is a landscape intervention that promotes urban agriculture in the interest of food security.

Historically, the Company Gardens in the centre of Cape Town were productive food gardens. We proposed that its original function be reinstated temporarily for the World Design Capital 2014.

Although the Company Gardens are historically significant landscapes, the lawn is not original and it is easily replaceable. We therefore proposed that all lawned areas be removed and replaced with vegetable gardens in sunny areas and with commercial flower gardens in the shady areas.

South African cities have far fewer productive gardens than most similar cities throughout the world. This is not sustainable, it threatens food security and it entrenches poverty.

The Gardens in Gardens will be useful, provocative and beautiful. The project would exhibit the efforts of various organisations involved in urban agriculture.

These 10 units provide on-site accommodation for doctors and nurses of the Vredenburg hospital.

To create a domestic and private environment, the staff residence has its main spaces separated from the activities of the hospital. This is achieved by a large stair which creates a threshold to the central space and manipulating the view from the central space to face the valley without any view of the hospital.

The steep mono-pitched roofs are aligned perpendicular to the dominant South-easterly and North-westerly winds to create a space protected from these strong winds.

The stepped platforms necessitated by the topography become useful in creating sub-spaces to the central exterior space. The terraces together with the low walls enclosing the stoeps and the pergolas assign potions of the main space to each unit. These devices are necessary to give the right level of privacy to each unit. Manipulation of the topography is therefore the primary device in establishing the character of the place.

We were approached to design an 80m² house on a site in Parkwood, a residential area on the edge of the Cape Flats. “There is a terrible old building at the back of the site, but we will break it down”, the client explained. Upon visiting the site we realised that the old building is a rare corrugated iron structure that dates from the 1920’s. This building type has largely been obliterated from Cape Town’s suburbs.

We told the clients we would prefer to fix up the old house rather than build new. The clients were emotionally overwhelmed at the suggestion since the building used to be their family home for two generations. Their grandparents were workers on vegetable farms in the area and they had extensive vegetable cultivation at the house. It was abandoned in the 1980’s and they assumed it was beyond repair.

Since 85% of the original Oregon Pine frame were still in good condition we knew that the project was viable. Reusing the old house would give our clients more space than they would have had if we built new, but the budget remained extremely limited. For bloody minded financial purposes and carefully considered conservation reasons we decided to perpetuate the informal way of construction for the new work. For instance there are no flashings used; roof edges are sealed by bending a sheet and windows were built in with cut pieces of flattened corrugated sheet around them. The building was not built with care and this spirit is deemed as central to its character.

A separated double bedroom with en-suite bathroom was added in a way that makes the new read as a later addition. This addition by itself was not sufficient to give the building a contemporary presence. We therefore entered into discussions with the client about the possibility of re-establishing a fruit and vegetable garden.