The Influencer’s Influencer: Peter Rich

WORDS Graham Wood PHOTOS Getty, Supplied

Ever wondered who or what inspired our current generation of architects? Peter Rich, who has created some of Africa’s most transformative buildings and taken local architectural approaches around the world, says valuing who you are and where you are is the place to start.

Peter Rich tells the story of how, when the Japanese architectural legend Kengo Kuma presented him with the World Architecture Festival award for building of the year in 2009 – for his Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre in Limpopo – he leaned in, gave him a hug and whispered something in his ear.

Peter had long admired Kuma, who later designed the Japan National Stadium for the doomed 2020 Olympic Games, so receiving the award from him was especially meaningful. He explains that Kuma’s great achievement was an approach to buildings that allowed their designs to be “open-ended”; more about the relationships between people, culture, the environment and social context than about the building itself.

After a period studying abroad at Columbia University in the US, Kuma looked to Japanese craft, especially the intricate and ingenious joints in timber work, to forge a revitalised brand of Japanese architecture. By focusing on a component such as a timber joint and multiplying it, he invented a kind of architecture that was about construction rather than design, method rather than object, relationships rather than form.

READ MORE: 10 Award-winning SA Buildings

What Peter has found most dispiriting in architecture of the recent past is the developer-led model, which commercialises architecture and commodifies buildings by conceiving them as “self-referential products” that do little to contribute to people’s lives. Too much computer-assisted design, he adds, also forces architects to think and design “in object terms”.“It’s killing cities,” he says.

Peter’s own building designs might look nothing like Kuma’s, but they’re similar in the way they resist being seen as commodifiable. His approach is also premised on starting where you are, and using what you have to invent something new. Peter’s buildings are not so much “things” as ways of making space. It’s a thread that runs through his career – the idea of “African space making”.

His formative influences have been well documented, not least in Jonathan Noble’s recent book, The Architecture of Peter Rich: Conversations with Africa. He was mentored by the maverick Portuguese-born architect and lecturer Pancho Guedes, who possibly did more than anyone else to forge a modernist approach to African architecture.

It was also Guedes who encouraged Peter to document Ndebele architecture, which he did through drawing rather than photography. His drawings were exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2018, which that year was curated by the Pritzker Prize-winning Irish architects Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects, whose work Peter also admires for “dealing with relationships in this open-ended way” and not being “about form”.

Recording Ndebele architecture (much of which has now vanished) began a lifetime’s work, whether here or elsewhere in Africa, of considering and formulating ways in which local cultures, customs and worldviews can be translated into architecture, and rethinking how space itself – the layout of a house or a village or a city – might respond to local ways of knowing and doing, so that it can carry local culture intact into the future.

But Peter has never been a purist. In fact, he still quotes a Ndebele matriarch on the hybrid, magpie nature of their architecture and art. She said to him, “We see what we want to see, and we make it our own.”

“It’s in the reinterpretation,” says Peter, “and how you invest an influence with symbolic meaning relevant to its changed place, context, culture and time, that gives it real meaning. The realisation that we’re part of a multicultural society and have to reconcile these things is actually quite an enriching thing. The contradictions are delightful!”

In engaging with the questions of how to synthesise tradition and modernity, he’s found himself looking to India for cues and dialogue, which he has pursued through teaching and lecturing. One of the figures he holds in the highest esteem is Pritzker Prize-winning Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi, who was also awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal last year (2022). He particularly likes the way Doshi looks for clues in the details of people’s lives – including the sacred – to design buildings and cities that can “enable people”. It’s about the power of observation, looking to people’s lives first, not shying away from the symbolic or, he says, trying to separate “the ordinary, the circumstantial and the sacred”. Those details, he says, make architecture potentially transformative. “Do not be so arrogant that you think you can abstract things and ignore all of that,” he warns.

Incidentally, Doshi, Kuma and Peter are among some 40 luminaries of the architectural world to be interviewed by another important figure in Indian architecture, Durganand Balsavar. His interviews, Peter points out, have become an important resource, and are used as a teaching tool at institutions such as Harvard University.

He also looks to the architecture of Latin America for resonances with our own circumstances. He mentions “projects that are coming out of Mexico and Paraguay that are exceptional”, and particularly admires Alberto Kalach’s “poetic economy of means” and “understanding of what it means to be local”, citing Kalach’s Hotel Terrestre in Puerto Escondido on the west coast of Mexico (featured in VISI 120).

“They don’t have the licence to be irresponsible, but that discipline does not deter them from making poetry,” he says. Peter never forgets the importance of architecture that brings pleasure to people – moments of delight.

What Kuma whispered in Peter’s ear was, “Stay small. Don’t get big like me.” At least for the moment, some of the “bigness” of the architectural enterprise has been disrupted. Despite the fallout this has caused throughout the industry, it is forcing architects to work small, use what they have and start where they are.

Peter is heartened by a new generation of South African architects “doing world-class work”. He particularly likes the way they’ve shaken off the limitations of modernism and are “responding to our multicultural reality… in a relaxed way”. In addition, young Africans are starting to ask questions about who they are and where they come from. There’s a growing appetite, he says, for architecture that actually engages with these questions. “I think we’re in a good place,” he sums up. “But what you need to do all the time is value who you are and where you come from.”

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