IN-PERSON London. Section B

Abstract

The context of urban informality is often unpredictable. Chance discoveries may be welcome, but the intrepid architectural researcher is equally likely to come across a nasty surprise. One such surprise was the discovery, during fieldwork in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, of a cat skinned and hung from the rafters of a half-constructed house in Duncan Village. This violent spectacle was encountered at Mekeni Road, part of a neighbourhood scheme under construction as transitional housing between informal shacks and the post-apartheid embrace of the formal city. However, instead of delivering home comforts and livability, this project provided the setting for a crime with a feline victim. What went wrong? Who was responsible? Why did it happen, and how did they get away with it? Any effort to piece this puzzle of housing failure together will inevitably be framed as a crime scene reconstruction, suggesting a role for the architect as detective. But this conceit – in which the designer is recast as evidence-gathering agent – is well-rehearsed in studio pedagogy as well as development practice disciplines. Moreover, as an ethical imperative in which architectural techniques may be used to uncover oppression or deception, the forensic styling of design has given rise to a discourse on recalibrating beauty in the pursuit of ugly truths. The link between informality and an aesthetics of investigation has long fascinated commentators and analysts alike. Building upon the case of the Mekeni Road cat, this paper outlines an agenda for investigatory aesthetics in the interrogation of urban informality.