COMPILED BY Gina Dionisio PHOTOS Dook; Adam Letch; Paris Brummer; Elsa Young; Jan Ras; Warren Heath; Nudge Studio

From bold façades to intricate screen walls, these textured face brick and breeze block builds blend modern aesthetics with timeless construction materials.

Contemporary Johannesburg Home

Arrive at this house for the first time, and it is difficult not to have your curiosity piqued by the monolithic façade of clay brick pavers set behind a pink right-angled triangle. Bold and unapologetic of its avant-garde grandeur, it provides an inkling of an entrance. “We’ve nicknamed this house the ‘shape-sorter house’,” says architect Gregory Katz. “Our conceptual journey began with the idea of a cube as an envelope.” Behind this elaborate geometric structure sits an unassuming constricted stretch of entryway leading to an understated front door. Step through it and you’re welcomed into a bright, spacious and airy home flooded with natural light.

Gregory describes the play of light created by the asymmetric windows as the gift that keeps on giving. The space is open and barrier-free, with each area flowing seamlessly into the next. Natural light sweeps through two stately half-moon cutouts on the ground floor. These wide half-cylinder openings frame views of the entire garden, breaking the barrier between indoors and outdoors. Much like the assertive façade, the interior boasts its own kind of confidence. It is a consciously eclectic mix of brightly coloured shapes, with a clean and minimalist aesthetic that serves as a canvas to showcase the homeowners’ green thumb and quirky art collection.

Read the full story on this contemporary Johannesburg home.

Contemporary Rondebosch Home

Rondebosch, a Cape Town suburb with a distinctly colonial air, is not the neighbourhood one would expect to find cutting-edge architectural design, so the first glimpse of this ultramodern structure comes as something of a surprise.

Designed for a young family, the house offers relaxed living and is ideally suited to the South African indoor-outdoor lifestyle. In a nod to decades-old construction elements used extensively in the area, the architects used standard precast concrete breeze blocks in the construction of a striking screen wall that acts as the “face” of the dwelling.

“It allows light to permeate while providing privacy and dappled light to the guest wing and terrace,” say the Three14 Architects design team of Kim Benatar, Sian Fisher and Miles Appelgryn. “The client’s brief called for a contemporary, open-plan home that offers a relaxed lifestyle and takes advantage of the site and the views.” The design ticks all those boxes and more.

Read the full story on this contemporary Rondebosch home.

Somerset West Church

When an existing church in the winelands of Somerset West became too small for its growing congregation, architect Jo Noero created an extraordinary new space. “As the new church needed to expand and contract easily to accommodate 450 to 900 people depending on the occasion, we converted the original church into a hall and performance space and built a new one approximately 25 metres away,” Jo says. A grassed courtyard links the two buildings – now converted into a hall and performance space – while the covered colonnade provides access to all spaces from the entrance gate.

Working closely with the minister, Gavin Millard, who trained as an architect before entering the ministry, Jo conceptualised a circular inner “drum”, large enough to accommodate 450 people. To incorporate the additional Christ Church congregation, a roofed square space fans out from the main circle, like a generous skirt. The dramatic vertical dimension of this circular space means the minister is never more than 15 metres from anyone in the audience.

Read the full story on this Somerset West Church.

Modernist Durban Home

On first encounter, House Shaw is brutally simple: a series of three-dimensional boxes, positioned beside and on top of one another on a long, triangular site cut into one of the steep slopes that characterise Durban’s forested university suburb. It is made of face brick, concrete, louvre windows, shutters and a bit of aluminium; no need for paint, wallpaper, air conditioning – not even curtains.

The house belongs to Colleen Wygers, who lived here with her late husband, fellow architect Paul Wygers. Sadly, Paul passed away shortly after we photographed the house; with Colleen’s permission, we’ve included his observations from that interview.

Paul liked to describe the home as Modernism morphing the heritage Durban veranda home – and, when it went onto the market in 2013, the couple bought it within hours of their first viewing. Designed by Hallen and Dibb Architects in the 1960s, it had been commissioned by legal luminary Douglas Shaw. “Douglas Shaw was sitting in an Eames chair in the lounge,” recalled Paul. “We chatted briefly about art and architecture. I don’t think he wanted to leave.”

Read the full story on this modernist Durban home.

Greenside Home

It takes a good eye to spot potential in a fixer-upper, particularly in a city like Johannesburg. There are some real gems – almost always undervalued – but their qualities are often lost beneath the add-ons that barnacle their way onto houses over time. Christo Vermeulen and Nico Venter are serial renovators. Inevitably, after a few years of living in a house, they find their eyes wandering.

They most certainly do have a knack for recognising the signs that something special might be lurking beneath the surface a nondescript exterior. Christo is a former textile designer turned builder/renovator – with a sideline in manufacturing bespoke features, especially metalwork and ironmongery – and Nico is an urban designer with an interest in the city’s architectural history. Together, they make a formidable team: insightful and capable, with the perfect combination of vision and respect for the innate qualities of a good find.

Read the full story on this Greenside home.

Pinelands Home

There’s a certain witchiness to Robert Silke‘s new family home in the Cape Town suburb of Pinelands. A darkly dramatic front gate framed by a brick archway reading Caverswall opens onto a narrow garden path, which leads you to a house that’s equal parts imposing and intriguing, with a steeply pitched, clay-tiled roof, spiral chimneys and brickwork finish – all in the same burnt-honey shade. “It’s basically a gingerbread house, right?” says Robert, taking in the facade of the 1938 Arts and Crafts Revival structure he shares with partner Gideon and their one-year-old daughter Lilith.

“Pinelands was established in the 1920s, when there was a big push around the world for an approximation of English country living,” says Robert. “There was a planner in the UK called Ebenezer Howard, who invented the suburb, which he originally called a garden city. The idea gained global traction in reaction to the Spanish flu – people felt that the way they lived in cities wasn’t healthy. Pinelands was actually the third garden city in the world.”

Read the full story on this Pinelands home.

Johannesburg House

What Toni Twidale wanted even more than a house was to live among the trees. “I wanted to see green all the time,” says Toni, who owns this home with her partner Graeme. “I wanted the outside in.” And so they decided to build a house that would, more than anything, be about the site.

The couple enlisted the help of architect Gregory Katz, known locally for his creative, experimental and often unconventional approach. Toni wanted to keep all the indigenous trees; Gregory’s brief, therefore, became something of a mathematical puzzle around fitting the dimensions of a house between the trees. In the end, he settled on two long, slim “bars”, with alternating strips of open space on either side and between them for the driveway, central courtyard and swimming pool. The two wings are connected by what Gregory calls an “umbilical cord” – a glazed corridor that steps down slightly with the slope of the site. The branches of the trees reach up and over a flat concrete roof, which is planted with wavy grass, essentially lifting what would have been on the ground up a level, and adding to the greenery.

Read the full story on this Johannesburg house.

Vredehoek Home

When Robyn and Clinton Campbell took the plunge and bought their first stand-alone property in Cape Town’s Vredehoek four years ago, they settled on 235m² with an existing house on it. Their initial plan was to keep some of the original house and go up by way of a major renovation, but that was thwarted when the foundations were found to be wanting.

Having to get their heads around a full demolition, the couple fortunately had a friend in architect Michael Lumby of ML-A, whose bold and honest use of materials was an aesthetic they both loved. “Our brief was pretty open,” says Clinton, “but budget was a major consideration, and we knew that the challenge would be to find simple and cost-effective solutions that wouldn’t compromise the creative vision.”

Known for his contextual cleverness and innovative approach to well-planned, efficient spaces, Michael came up with a design of unexpectedly generous spaces for such a small home. “My idea was to step the house down in sync with the slope, thus allowing the spaces to open up as you move through it,” he explains.

Read the full story on this Vredehoek home.

House of the Big Arch and House of the Tall Chimneys

In a private reserve in the Waterberg, three hours north of Johannesburg, a series of buildings crouches camouflaged in a forest. You’d struggle to see them among the dense foliage, even from above. Two of those buildings – House of the Big Arch and House of the Tall Chimneys – constitute the home of a pair of veterinary scientists, a husband and wife whose passion for nature and the great outdoors drew them to this wild corner of the country.

Owing to its location on a 5 000-hectare farm-turned nature reserve, it’s not uncommon to see giraffe, leopard or genet, and an abundance of birds, from the paradise flycatcher to the yellow-bellied greenbul. It was during a ramble here that the owners came across a sandstone promontory that plunges into the riverine forest below, and decided that this very spot was to be their home.

As if contending with a steep gradient in a forest in the middle of the bushveld wasn’t enough to challenge their architect, their brief to him was “simply” to construct a tree house, without removing a single tree from the site. The young architect, who collaborates with a host of brilliant minds under the collective pseudonym Frankie Pappas, had the site Lidar-scanned to map the all-important trees.

Read the full story on this Waterberg Home.

Calling Academy

Located on a bucolic plot bordering Polkadraai Road between Stellenbosch and Kuilsriver, the site was allocated by the previous generation of surrounding landowners to serve the local farming community and originally comprised six existing classrooms, a reception and sports field.

An annual increase in grade intakes compounded by a matrix of constrictions required SALT Architects to implement a fluxive, organic design process that simultaneously maximises the quality of the learning environment and centres the natural beauty of the site, at the lowest possible cost. The guiding principle is the prioritisation of quality education over the cost of facilities.

Read the full story on the Calling Academy.

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The post 10 Bold South African Builds Featuring Brick appeared first on Visi.

WORDS Graham Wood PRODUCTION Sven Alberding PHOTOS Warren Heath / Bureaux

What Toni Twidale wanted even more than a house was to live among the trees. “I wanted to see green all the time,” says Toni, who owns this home with her partner Graeme. “I wanted the outside in.” And so they decided to build a house that would, more than anything, be about the site.

The couple enlisted the help of architect Gregory Katz, known locally for his creative, experimental and often unconventional approach. Toni wanted to keep all the indigenous trees; Gregory’s brief, therefore, became something of a mathematical puzzle around fitting the dimensions of a house between the trees. In the end, he settled on two long, slim “bars”, with alternating strips of open space on either side and between them for the driveway, central courtyard and swimming pool. The two wings are connected by what Gregory calls an “umbilical cord” – a glazed corridor that steps down slightly with the slope of the site. The branches of the trees reach up and over a flat concrete roof, which is planted with wavy grass, essentially lifting what would have been on the ground up a level, and adding to the greenery.

Floor-to-ceiling glass walls let the outside in, especially when they’re opened up and the house is transformed into something more like a garden pavilion, the interiors becoming part of the garden itself. Some trees are so close they seem to be inside; sections of the eaves had to be cast with cutouts through which the branches could grow.

Nevertheless, Gregory considers the design as following a fairly typical double-storey model, with bedrooms upstairs and living space downstairs – but flipped onto its side. This way, all rooms face north so they have lovely natural light and are warmed by the sun in winter (although the deep eaves keep direct sun out in summer). Every single room opens out onto the garden. The result is “almost like a resort”, as Gregory puts it. “Joburg has the most amazing country feeling in the suburbs,” he says, so it’s actually quite an appropriate response: a real suburban sanctuary, so self-contained you could be almost anywhere.

While the configuration may have been dictated by logic and necessity, Gregory still found opportunities to exercise his creativity. The roofs are flat, but he’s played around with volume by changing the floor level. The open-plan living area, which includes the lounge, kitchen and dining room, opens onto an outdoor sunken lounge with a barbecue and pizza oven. A skylight above it seems to open to the sky, exaggerating the sense of height.

Another key part of Gregory’s approach is his love of brick as a building material. “Face brick tones so well with our environment,” he says. “It’s the same colour as the ground.” All around Johannesburg, the soil has a ferrous tinge, so bricks “somehow feel more relevant than some kind of imported colour palette”.

Especially at the entrance of the house, which necessitated solid walls for privacy, Gregory has played around with various bricklaying patterns. He’s used bricks to design breeze-block “veils” and parapets for the roof garden. At other points inside, he’s used variations in colour and created built-in shelving. They’ve even been sliced thin to create skirting and bathroom tiles. There’s a textural richness and expressiveness that seems filled with infinite possibility.

It’s not only an aesthetic principle. “I think restraint is a good design principle,” he says. “You’re not overconsuming; you’re not overdoing things.” Rather than leading down a path towards minimalism, in Gregory’s hands it becomes a rich, tactile, expressive approach, which proves that using less might yield a whole lot more than you expected.

Toni’s response in furnishing the house is highly sympathetic to Gregory’s approach. “The structure speaks for itself,” she says, “so you don’t need to add anything. When simple is done well, it’s the best.” She also sought out locally designed and manufactured furniture wherever she could, as much to keep the carbon footprint low as to celebrate local skills. There’s a kind of easy elegance that results – a resonance that isn’t too self-conscious or overdetermined.

You could say the same for the house. While superficially it might look like an homage to Mid-century Modernism, it’s actually a dazzlingly complex and highly original response to Johannesburg suburban life. And, like all the best Modernist design, it’s deceptively simple-looking. |

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The post Johannesburg House appeared first on Visi.

Ever wondered who inspires our current generation of architects? A stint abroad afforded Johannesburg’s Gregory Katz the chance to experience the works of architectural heroes such as Charles and Ray Eames, Louis Kahn and Hans Scharoun in the flesh.

Things have a way of coming full circle. In the early ’90s, Gregory Katz was pulling all-nighters along with his fellow Bachelor of Architecture students at the University of Cape Town. One of their lecturers, Gus Guernica, was responsible for teaching them about detailing buildings. “Gus would say to us, ‘Why does glass need to sit in a frame? Why can’t you put the window straight into the wall? Don’t just accept that a window needs a frame!’” recalls Gregory, smiling. “He taught us to go back to the fundamentals and to challenge convention; for me, that was very formative .”

Now a lecturer himself at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, Gregory has spent the past year unpacking ornament and detail with his own students. “We’re revisiting ideas around ornaments in the local context, and pulling them away from the modernist conversation to find out what’s relevant here and now.”

For Gregory – who interned with starchitects Zvi Hecker in Berlin and Daniel Libeskind in Los Angeles during his undergraduate studies, and went on to do his MArch at Columbia University in New York – it took years abroad to truly appreciate the unique opportunities South African architects have. “If you’re in one place for a long time, you tend to become kind of myopic,” he says. “When you’re new to a place, you’re able to identify things of value in the local context.” One of his current projects that speaks to this is a prototype for low-cost, modular, barrel-vaulted brick structures that can accommodate multiple storeys, designed specifically for the back yards of RDP homes in Khayelitsha.

“There’s a practice called back-yard housing, where homeowners build informal shacks at the back of their property to rent out,” he explains. “We’re looking to assist homeowners with the technology to make those areas more dense, so they can build two or three storeys. The brickwork is based on old Roman technology, but in a new setting, seen through a new cultural lens.”

Gregory’s stint overseas afforded him the privilege of experiencing the works of his architectural heroes in person. “When you go on a pilgrimage to see famous buildings by skilled architects, the learnings are much deeper than when you see pictures of them,” he says. “You’re able to take in everything in three dimensions, to touch the surfaces, to feel the weight of the building emotionally. It has an impact on your soul.”

Hans Scharoun’s Berliner Philharmonie and the Berlin State Library beguiled Gregory with their masterful detailing and adventurous use of materials; Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in San Diego and Phillips Exeter Academy Library blew him away with complex spatial hierarchies and use of concrete in conjunction with softer materials such as timber; and Charles and Ray Eames’s Case Study House in California was, to Gregory, a perfect example of how the architectural power couple’s understanding of the way things were made informed their design process.

Gregory believes that the future of architecture is going to look very different – not just with regards to sustainable design (he rates BV Doshi, Charles Correa and Hassan Fathy as frontrunners in this field), but also when it comes to construction methods. “I’ve based a lot of what I do in my practice around the ideas of relooking, rethinking and reinterpreting old ways of doing things,” he says. “I have a student now who’s researching how to transform fungal mycelium into building material, and another one who’s 3D-printing with mud. As architects, we can’t keep doing things the same way we always have.”

Looking for more architectural inspiration? Check out this bold contemporary home in Joburg designed by Gregory.

The post Architecture Influencers: Gregory Katz appeared first on Visi.

A block of apartments in Maboneng, Johannesburg, combines thoughtful, occupant-centred design with a modern African aesthetic.

Is this what modern African architecture should look like? It certainly is a modern African design in a modern African city – Johannesburg’s eastern CBD, on the peripheries of Maboneng – shaped according to the real needs of real people. The building is a block of flats called Corner Fox (it’s on the corner of Fox and Commissioner streets), and was designed by Gregory Katz Architecture.

READ MORE: Bold Contemporary Joburg Home

Gregory has taken a bunch of ordinary requirements and constraints, including a tight budget, and created something quite extraordinary. His design is full of ingenious little departures from the standard template for a high-density residential building, all of which make a big difference. And refreshingly, it looks like nothing else around it.

The eye-catching façade is achieved with nothing more than painted stock bricks, and a sprinkling of facebricks turned at right angles to create that pixelated-looking pattern. The building takes up a full city block and follows a classic courtyard layout, with the flats on the outside forming a protective outer wall, and looking in over a central courtyard with parking, a lawn and a swimming pool. “We were working with the idea of a sanctuary,” says Gregory.

It’s not cut off from its surroundings, though. The edges along the sidewalk are home to shops that face the street to keep the pavements around the building active, busy and safe. The arrangement of the apartments and the corridors inside is also designed to be busy and active. “We wanted to recreate the micro-context of the street and foster a sense of community,” says Gregory.

READ MORE: About Face: Contemporary Face Brick Buildings

He has brought the common areas – such as corridors – to life with clever tweaks. For example, there are bulges and undulations along the corridor edges where people can stop and chat. “Typically, there are no breakout spaces in the CBD, so people tend to leave their buildings, which are then largely deserted during the day,” he says.

He has also built in multipurpose spaces with laundry basins, going so far as to hope that residents might use the balustrades to dry their washing. “It can be quite beautiful,” he says. Speaking of which, the pattern on the façade was inspired by shweshwe fabric. The fusion of patterns hints at a modern African aesthetic, opening up a sense of possibility for the future of inner-city life.

For more information, visit gregorykatz.co.za.

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The Reggio Emilia approach is an educational philosophy developed after World War II by teacher Loris Malaguzzi, alongside the parents in the villages surrounding the Italian city of Reggio Emilia.

When working on the 1 700 square metre King David Linksfield pre-primary school in Johannesburg, Gregory Katz Architecture, a Johannesburg-based firm, looked to this early educational approach as inspiration for the building’s design.

Some of the pillars of this philosophy are that children must have some control over their learning, and that they must be able to learn through their experiences: touching, moving, listening and observing. It also recognises the value of their relationships with other children, as well as material items.

Some of the highlights of the building in achieving this are standardised precast concrete elements of various shapes and sizes, which have been used to create window openings and hollow columns that mimic children’s building blocks, contributing to a fascinating play of light and shadows. This building block theme can be seen throughout the school; from its walls, through to the bathrooms and the school’s ‘climbing library’.

The school caters to nearly 500 children from play school age through to Grade R.

See more of Gregory Katz’s designs at gregorykatz.co.za.

(h/t) designboom.com

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