Jo Noero’s House For Nicholas de Klerk

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The house that award-winning architect Jo Noero designed for display designer Nicholas de Klerk was never going to be a sprawling mansion. Noero has very firm ideas about residential property design. VISI asked him 3 questions about his philosophical approach to architecture.

Q: House De Klerk is relatively small compared to many other dwellings designed by architects. What was your thinking behind this decision?

You could say it’s almost an ethical decision. I can see no reason why anyone in this world should need more than 150 to 200 square metres to live in. Given the fact that we have a huge housing shortage, not only in this country, but in the world, it seems to me that if we’re looking at resources for building houses we should be looking at maximum standards, rather than minimum ones. I take offense when I see those gargantuan McMansions being built on the Atlantic Seaboard. They nauseate me, those five story buildings with glass elevators. I’m both amazed at how people can think they need all that much space to live in and how architects can actually get their heads around designing a house with 15 bedrooms, parking for eight cars and three living rooms. Secondly, from a very ordinary position, I just wouldn’t know how to do it. I couldn’t get my head around designing as house like that.

Q: The brief from Nicholas was to create a house that would make people stop and look again. What were your underlying thoughts about the aesthetics of the house and how did you approach the actual construction?

I think that one of the ideas in this house was that architecture is very susceptible to fashion, but our problem with architecture vs fashion is that you can buy a piece of clothing this year and when it goes out of fashion next year you just put it to one side and buy another uniform. With architecture you can’t. It takes years to build a building and that building lasts for 40, 50 or maybe 100 years. We’ve got to look at trying to embody more enduring values and qualities in the architecture we make than just paying homage to the current fashion. This house cost around R1.5 million rand, which is not a huge amount in today’s world, but we started off with only half that amount. It’s taken us 5 years to build the house and we’ve built it slowly, as Nicholas has been able to afford it. We’ve been able to add a little bit more and a little bit more, which is also a nice way to build. In a way things mature. It’s a bit like slow food. I’m starting to believe in slow building. I think this obsession that architects have about building quickly, getting the plans out, just leads to really dumb buildings with no architectural merit whatsoever. The thing about contemporary architectural practice that I find quite strange is that we tend to describe architecture in every term other than the beautiful. I think we’ve unashamedly tried to make a beautiful house with great spaces.

Q: Besides practicing as an architect, you also teach at university. What do you think are important theoretical considerations in terms of the future of architecture?

A similar thing has happened in fine art and architecture: There are very few schools that still teach students how to make. There are artists now who sit in California and they theorise art and then they get someone in New York to make the whole artwork. I think it is tragic that the theorisation of architecture is held captive by people from other disciplines. Architectural theory no longer belongs to architecture, it belongs to other disciplines. I think that architecture needs to reclaim it’s history, and by reclaiming its history it can theorise itself through the understanding of its history. That has been lost. We have young people whose sense of architectural history extends only as far back as the websites that they look at, which is probably last year’s winning project for some competition. That’s quite sad.

I can understand in South Africa there’s a certain amount of insecurity about our past because it’s all white, western and European. But my view is that until we can theorise an architectural history that belongs to Africa – which we can’t do at the moment because it hasn’t been properly written – we have to rely on some other kind of history, we can’t just chuck it out. It’s about trying to reclaim architectural theory as distinct from other theories and to say that architectural theory comes from architectural history.  History teaches us to theorise architecture.

For a comprehensive look at the house, get the Spring Issue of VISI, out now.

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