Diary: Bad Architecture Stories (Hunch 3)

30 September, Johannesburg
I emptied the swimming pool to clean up the two-year-old muck at the bottom. The pool had been colonized by 18 frogs and their endless sons and daughters. I threw the frogs into the river 150 meters away from the pool.
The next day, all 18 frogs came back. The pool is the only place they know. The power of their simple-mindedness made them oblivious to the hardship of the return. The exhausted frogs all dried to death in the afternoon.

6 October
One buys things, money goes, and soon the things sit around, losing importance. One stops noticing them.
And suddenly, one needs to GET RID OF ALL THE STUFF; the memories attached to materials become less important than the simple urge to make them disappear.

13 October
The Bed’s Life
People came with a truckload of family and friends to fetch their new bed. They cheered and raved, loading a new life with a bed. By the end of the 300-kilometer trip back to the township, the bed had been rejuvenated.

22 October
It’s a cleansing process.
In order to move on, one has to let go. And in order to let go without too much loss, I end up selling. The Jumbo Sale! I’m selling it all to my neighbors’ servants!
I open the gate and let them in to my family’s nine-year accumulation of furniture, pots and pans, clothes and memories.

12 November
I’ve just spent three days examining the work of third-year architecture students at my former school, the University of Witwatersrand. I hadn’t met these students before, but from their presentations, I could describe the neighborhoods they come from, the houses they live in, and what their parents talk about at the dinner table. There is a shocking degree of complacency, a total absence of confusion and struggle; as a result, the works are limited to resolving what is trivial to architecture, society, and life. Was I also timid and apathetic as a third-year student? Was I also too comfortable? Or was I too angry?

18 November
I try to practice my Berlage thesis — “THE OMNIPRESENCE OF THE WALL AND ITS UNSPEAKABLE OTHER SIDE” — on daily basis. South Africa is a compression of all possible cultures and all possible hang-ups; wherever there is an interface, there is a wall. The walls here become street furniture. After awhile, they are not even brutal; they are simply the frontline of the battle between middle-class and poor.
I opened my gate to let people in — to buy or to chat. But the open gate didn’t invite; they still rang the bell for permission.

19 November
At dinner, chairmen were sitting all around me, each conspiring to be more important than the others.
Important in a minor culture of South Africa, in a minor club, in a minor tribe. Importance and status get blown out of proportion, and finally this villagey world becomes the WHOLE WORLD of existence.

20 November
Because of the Jumbo Sale, I’ve gotten to know all the invisible inhabitants of my neighborhood. I memorize people’s names and talk to them on the street. I don’t feel scared and foreign anymore.
Non-blacks have warned me that it’s dangerous, but I think it’s more dangerous not to know the people that pass one’s door everyday.

21 November
The Chinese are going to build a cultural center on a prime site in Midrand, a booming city between Johannesburg and Pretoria. In the coming five years, the land value will increase ten-fold, I was told.
At the meeting, I sat again with all the chairmen. They want CHINESE-STYLE ARCHITECTURE. After five minutes, I was asked to estimate how big the activity hall for 1,500 people should be and how much it will cost. The architect’s job is to estimate COSTS and make DRAWINGS, I realized.

22 November
I’m making some new friends who are all domestic workers here. There’s Anna, who works and lives just up the road. She comes to shop at the Jumbo Sale with her sister-in-law. Sometimes they stop by during their lunch hour to have tea and complain about their bosses.
Then there’s Margritte. It wasn’t until her fourth visit to the sale that she bought something. Then we started to chat. She told me that I will have five children — three daughters and two sons.
One has to be sensitive. The majority of South Africans, the have-nots, do not expect sympathy or even understanding from the haves. The walls are more than 100 years old in Johannesburg.

24 November
Just returned from an exhibition at my former university. Bumped into quite a few people I used to know. They’ve gone somewhere and I’ve gone somewhere else. Their lives, collectively, are like a big truck; once I was on it with them, but by choice, I got off. NOW I SEE THE TRUCK DRIVING PAST ME, and somehow I feel lonely, very lonely.

25 November
Today I really wouldn’t mind working for any of the big-name architects in Holland.

26 November
I’m probably going to get the Chinese cultural center project, but I’m not sure whether I want it. I'm scared to build. I’m also scared not to build. But I can’t just talk about Jon Jerde, I want to be like him, or go beyond him; and to do that I have to do all these things I don’t feel ready for.

28 November
The other day, while I was writing, someone was in our garage stealing things from the Jumbo Sale. Six hours later we got the guy.

1 December
For the past three days I’ve been homeless in the middle-class sense. The phone line at home in Johannesburg has already been cut off and now the house belongs to someone else.

8 December
I know the burglar.
His name is Mike.
I also know his brother, Charles.
Mike worked in the garden for three months and also did the paint job. Charles worked before him. I know their whole family, their friends. They are from Malawe.
The morning of the burglary, Mike came by with a friend to look at the stuff for sale; they left without buying anything. That evening, when I came home at 7:00 p.m., no one else was there. The house was so quiet; I felt anxious; so I wrote until 10:00 and then decided to go to a movie by myself.
While walking to my car (which was parked right outside the garage since the garage was packed with the Jumbo Sale stuff) I noticed light coming from the side door of the garage. So instead of going to the car I went to the side door, which was WIDE OPEN. There was Mike, in the brightly–lit garage, four meters away from me. We were face to face.
For a moment I was confused — I was so accustomed to seeing him that I thought I might have let him in myself. But he immediately shouted at me, and then sideways, which made me think there was someone else there.
Then he ran towards me with the stuff he has chosen in his hands; I turned; he threw it at me; I wasn’t hurt.
Then I ran like mad and hid myself in a dark corner of the garden, under a tree, where I could see the property gate and the garage. I opened the gate with the remote control in hope that he — or they — would just leave. Someone ran towards the gate but didn't go out.
Squatting under the tree, I started to dial the emergency number with my mobile phone. But when the phone light went on, I changed my mind — afraid that it would help Mike to locate me.
For a couple of minutes, there was no sound. Nobody attacked me from behind, nobody left the property from the gate, and nobody came back.
Then, before I realized what I was doing, I was running back to the car, jumping in, locking the doors, and driving out towards the police station.
Four hours later, the cops came without a torch, without weapons, and their van broke down in my garden. They looked around anyway. Obviously no one was still on the property.
Then I took them across the street to where Mike stays. It was 3:00 a.m. and Mike was sleeping tightly with no pants on.
I was at the police station until 4:00 a.m., writing my own report.

12 December
The story of Mike and Jumbo Sale didn’t go any further.
I feared that Mike or his family and friends would come back for revenge so I packed all our stuff in two days and left the house. The things I hadn’t sold, I gave to our domestic workers or donated to charity. I didn’t see Mike again, I didn’t hear from the cops or the court, and I never went back to the police station to inquire about the case.
It was a sad end for our nine-year home.I left with a

Exhibition: Berlage Thesis, Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam