Architecture

Architecture

Hip-hop architect Mokena Makeka has a clean-shaven head and a distinctive preference for button shirts with colourful verticals. On occasion, he might finish off the look with a snappy fedora, as he did the night I publically interviewed him at the Cape Town Library.

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Not sure how to kick-start things, I asked Makeka, comfortably seated on a big white couch, unperturbed by the public attention, how he came to architecture and what his favourite building material is. As part of the stage-act, the interview forming part of publisher Ntone Edjabe’s Chimurenga Sessions, I read a snippet from Ivan Vladislavic’s 1989 short story "Journal of a Wall”, using the writer’s loving description of a brick as my cue. "It isn’t a brick,” responded the Transkei-born Lesotho-raised architect. He then quickly detoured into an explanation of how hip hop has played a key role in his evolution as an architect, retreading a familiar path, one we’d walked seven years before. "I am an odd fish,” Makeka told me in 2002, in what he later revealed was his first ever media interview.

"I come from conflicting contexts. I was born in Transkei, but I grew up in Lesotho with my family. My dad was the ambassador from Lesotho to the UN so I actually grew up in New York for a large portion of my youth, until I was 12 years old.” After that he was recalled back to Lesotho; "I did my high school there, and then, in 1994, I came and did my tertiary education at UCT.” It was in New York that Makeka, founder and principal architect at Makeka Design Lab (MDL), was introduced to hip hop.

"I was there when hip hop was starting up, the really early days: Run DMC, Fresh Prince, before he was Will Smith. It was really an amazing time to be there. If I show you the hairstyles I had at that time, the straight hair, it was crazy stuff.” But it wasn’t always a comfortable time. "His African American classmates often teased Makeka about his African heritage. "Do you have clothes back home?” they cruelly joked. "I wasn’t exactly the coolest person at school.”

Time and a change of address have seen Makeka evolve from being the odd-one-out into a high profile public figure, the very antithesis of his dopey schoolboy self. It helped that the would-be engineering student turned architectural graduate had ambition. Loads of it. When I first interviewed Makeka in 2002 he had just recently pitched his idea to retrofit Cape Town’s Heerengracht, a wide public avenue that feeds off Adderley Street and terminates under the N2 flyover near Duncan Dock, to the Department of Arts and Culture. Billed as the Africa Gateway Millennium Precinct, it aimed to "promote appropriate use patterns and social imprinting on the station, as part of a broader strategy for the ultimate creation of high order public space that maximizes amenity, choice, and makes no sacrifice in terms of quality”.

Part of the project’s scope included retaining Jan van Riebeeck’s statue in the redesign, a rather brave ideological proposition some might argue. "I am not interested in the erasure of history, or cultural perspectives,” he explained, "unlike what happened in Eastern Europe. We need to develop a culture that has an inclusive view of history. History has always been the version written by the victors. I think it would be incredibly interesting to have the version of victor, but include that of the vanquished.” Nothing ever came of the wildly ambitious project, although the detailed research Makeka put into it later proved invaluable when he pitched on – and then won – the tender to redesign Cape Town’s central railway station. Although MDL is sharing the project with Comrie + Wilkinson Architects, Makeka, an architect noted for his crisp linear geometries and improvised modernist aesthetic, has pushed through some of the station’s more innovative features. One of these is the large public square outside, currently a mishmash of hawker’s stalls and dank, untended garden.

It will offer a space to congregate free from the fear of being hit by a car or taxi. Explained Makeka to the small audience in the library, the park’s existence came about through subterfuge: he told stern city officials that the station needed an unrestricted public assembly point in case of terrorist attacks. Although Makeka does not explicitly name his progressively minded architectural style, it does share certain conceptual affinities with what has been described as hip hop architecture. This is not a joke term coined to make sense of the baroque excesses of hip hop’s elite, as seen on MTV Cribs; it is far more optimistic. "The architectural entities that evolve from a hip hop spatial paradigm draw on the best of the past and the present,” wrote Craig Wilkins in a foundation text, published in 2000.

Hip hop architecture’s chief theoretical proponent, Wilkins is a professor of architecture at the University of Michigan and the director of the university’s Detroit Community Design Center. Like Makeka, he was brought up on new black music, in his case the early funk of Prince. Although developed as a response to the blight in particularly African American communities, Wilkins theory has resonance locally: "Employed in communities where there is a need and cry for an environment that does not repress but relieves, hip hop architecture replaces the constrictive with the supportive.” It is a point of view that slots perfectly with Makeka’s own ambitious vision, which expresses a distaste for using the contingent aesthetics of the township – pine, corrugated iron, chicken mesh – to singularly formulate a new, vernacular South African architecture. Buildings, he argues, should inspire the communities in which they are laid down, not mirror their impoverishment.

_Sean O’Toole is a writer, journalist and editor of Art South Africa