Making Waves

Low-cost and versatile, corrugated metal roofing has a long history as a material of choice in SA - modern refinements are now allowing it to be used in new and energy-efficient ways

- MARK VAN DIJK

Corrugated metal sheets were a feature of the many mine towns that sprung up along the Witwatersrand during South Africa’s (and Australia’s, and California’s) turn-of-the-century gold rushes. Houses, shops and churches – dubbed ʻtin tabernacles’ by British churchgoers and early frontier folk – had their walls and roofs built out of those ubiquitous corrugated galvanised iron sheets, decades before those same sheets became the building material of choice in townships and informal settlements across South Africa.

Indeed, ʻSilver Shacks’ – where the walls and roof are made of shiny, corrugated steel sheets – are much sought-after in South Africa’s low-income areas. They do not rust, they don’t rot; they are cheap to make and easy to install; and they seem to last forever.

And they’re trendy, too. In late 2015 Architects without Borders wowed South Africa’s Design Indaba with its Casas Melhoradas, a double-storey, low-cost house created to improve housing conditions for low-income groups in Maputo, Mozambique. The house featured a first-floor concrete base, with another lightweight double-storey wooden and corrugated iron house on top.

Influential architecture magazine Dezeen featured a corrugated aluminium-clad building called The Tinhouse, which ʻcelebrates corrugated metal sheeting, commonly used on the agricultural buildings of the rural landscape. It does so in a thoroughly contemporary way by using mill-finished corrugated aluminium as the external cladding for both roof and walls.’