The Influencer’s Influencer: Ant

WORDS Annette Klinger PHOTOS Gabrielle Aquadro/Frankie Pappas (House Of The Flying Bowtie, Rosebank Health Village), Dave Southwood/Frankie Pappas (Ant Apartment), Courtesy Of Frankie Pappas 

Ever wondered who inspired our current generation of architects? For one of the founders of design collective Frankie Pappas, the muse makes itself known in everything from Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strips to the Euclidean Geometry in the work of local architect Jo Noero.

Ant thinks Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House is really bad architecture. There, he’s said it. And don’t even get him started on Le Corbusier, Michelangelo and Walter Gropius. “Mies van der Rohe was more interested in how steel met glass than how the sun worked or music sounded, how rivers flooded, or how life was lived,” says Ant, alluding to the Farnsworth House’s multiple floodings since its completion in 1951. “Almost the entire tradition of Western formal architecture has produced sculpture, rather than architecture – and then celebrated the individual as genius. Architecture lost its way a long time ago, and it now sits somewhere between artistic expression, egotistical pursuit and stylish endeavour. We should be building a remarkable future – not architecture for fancy f*****g photos.”

In fact, to Ant, buildings have never been as important as the music, the people and the food inside them, or the landscape surrounding them. “I’m not sure whether it is a coincidence that, in my experience, the unfussier buildings have housed the happier music and the kinder people.”

Ant’s contrarian point of view has served him well in his short career, most notably as a founder of Frankie Pappas – a collective pseudonym for an ever-evolving group that encompasses architects, coders, engineers, artists and designers. It’s a concept, explains Ant, that was inspired by the 1930s collective of mathematicians, Nicolas Bourbaki, who favoured creative collaboration above solitary egotistical pursuit. Literature nerds might recognise the name Frankie Pappas as belonging to that of the unapologetically irreverent character in Willard Manus’s 1966 novel Mott the Hoople. It’s a kind of IYKYK inside joke that pokes fun at the starchitecture culture that sees firms named after their founders. “I think architectural culture is hyper-competitive and narcissistic, to the detriment of calm, considered and careful thought,” says Ant.

Ant came to architecture not via an epiphanous thunderbolt, but rather more boringly, after the recommendation of an aptitude test. “As with anything – relationships, work, bird-watching, drawing, painting, maths, woodwork – love only developed over time, with a certain devotion and curiosity,” he says. Starting during his studies at the University of Cape Town’s School of Architecture, Ant learnt invaluable lessons working at four different architectural firms: Wolff Architects, Noero Architects and StudioMAS in South Africa, and Urban-Think Tank in Zurich.

Heinrich Wolff made an impact on Ant with his brilliant academic mind and ability to rigorously adhere to rules – only to break them if necessary; Jo Noero, with his superior draughtsmanship and obsession with Euclidean geometry; and Sean Mahoney of StudioMAS with his sparse material palette and general unfussiness. As for Hubert Klumpner of Urban-Think Tank, Ant likens him to a contemporary Christopher Alexander – obsessed with the big idea.

Ant maintains that he’s inspired by far more than architecture, though, citing Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson, artists Izzy Duarte and Esther Mahlangu, author Herman Charles Bosman, philosopher Alain de Botton, as well as his late mother, as having influenced his world view the most.

Perhaps to the chagrin of the more traditionally minded of the architectural fraternity, Ant’s unorthodox approach has seen him earn Frankie Pappas a slew of awards, including the International Grand Prize for Best Building in the World, World Dwelling of the Year and Highest Award for Sustainability in Architecture. His widely acclaimed and publicised House of the Big Arch (featured in VISI 107) – the breathtaking “treehouse” that he built in the Waterberg nature reserve for his late mother, Nadine – perhaps best encapsulates Ant’s philosophy of architecture being a beautiful solution to a complex problem.

“The form of a building is the direct result of unpacking every single constraint of a project, and of deliberately studying how these constraints work in relation to one another,” says Ant. “In House of the Big Arch, our principal parameter was the need to build a dwelling in a riverine forest without removing a single tree. More philosophically, it was to celebrate and lionise the bushveld surrounds by limiting our interference with nature in every way possible. To have been able to work on something like this for seven years with someone so dear was the most wonderful privilege.”

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