Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Ozayr Saloojee
The city of Johannesburg rests on the Witwatersrand (“Ridge of White Waters) Basin – known locally as the “Rand”—an almost 60 kilometre long scarp that also forms a continental divide, draining northern waters into the Indian Ocean and southern waters into the Atlantic. The city on this divide was (and still is) the site of many other divisions – with apartheid among the most famous of these and Johannesburg’s geological history an echo of its racial one. This paper reflects on a (now) two year research and studio teaching project that explores the extractive terrains (and the associated ecologies that link labor, wealth, dispossession, power and emancipation) and ontological readings and re-readings of Johannesburg’s grounds. The studio reflects on the productive and critical role that representation – image making, and architectural and landscape image-making in particular – can embody and carry through the studio structure and assignments. Three initial studio assignments aimed to explore local subjectivities (through the work of photographer Santu Mofokeng), global views (critical and infrastructural mapping) and system ecologies (a machine/tool atlas). The last assignment explored (through a single, deep-section drawing) and proposed a reconciliatory landscape and architectural future. Collectively projects were a framework for thinking about how we might “un/build” understandings and artefacts that help uncover, identify, and propose a reconciliatory superfluity, to use Achille Mbembé’s word, of relations towards an ethical reclamations of landscape.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.110.13
Volume Editors
Robert Gonzalez, Milton Curry & Monica Ponce de Leon
ISBN
978-1-944214-40-1
