Learning from Steinkopf

Abstract

This paper contributes to the deliberations around the future of modernist architecture in the Modern Heritage of Africa (MoHoA) initiative. As creative practitioners and academics, our work has focused on considerations of architecture and urbanism, variously designing, theorizing, and photographing cities and structures. Our work is very much a critique of architectural photography, an approach to visualizing and thinking about cities that is analytical. Our collaborative work is set in dialogue with conventional forms of architectural scholarship and photography. For 12 years we have been working to examine the questions of 'apartheid’s modernities’. Our current project is to document architect Roelof S. Uytenbogaardt’s buildings. Uytenbogaardt died in the late 1990s.His papers are lodged at UCT Libraries’ Department of Manuscripts and Archives. We have been collecting and constructing our own archive and have recorded a large percentage of Uytenbogaardt’s public buildings, projects and sites in South Africa.