BUILDING AN ICON

Kevin Fellingham, principal architect at Kevin Fellingham Architects, and a former lecturer at Cambridge University, UCT and the School of Explorative Architecture, talks about HOUSE HANSON and DENSTONE COURT, built in 1937/38.

- KEVIN FELLINGHAM

I WOULD LIKE TO TALK ABOUT A PAIR OF JOBURG BUILDINGS designed by Norman Hanson - one since demolished, the other altered beyond recognition. Both continue to exist as ideas recorded in drawings and memories, and captured in photographs. Had they been built today, they might appear unexceptional - but if we look at the photographs, the cars, the neighbours, the clothing and the horse-drawn cart, we can try to imagine just how strange they must have seemed almost 90 years ago. We still think of buildings like this as "modern".

While the language of modern architecture has been shared among many architects, Hanson spoke it in his own way. It is the plans for his buildings that are extraordinary, with oblique and curved elements set in tension with a gridded rectangular order. Architects read plans in the same way as authors read books; and just as the novelist Cormac McCarthy confessed that all books are made from other books, architects will admit that all plans are made from other plans. We read into them not just the shapes of buildings, but the lives that have been, or will be, lived within them by people who will never be aware of the drawings that give rise to so much of their daily experience.

We experience the secret language of plans when we visit a building. We are led from one space to another by the gestures of walls, drawn to the doors and windows, guided through an organised sequence of visual and physical experiences of space, light and materiality. Le Corbusier coined the term "promenade architecturale" for this invention, inspired by the idea of a camera moving through a scene as a protagonist in the story.