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"Manifesto"
Late in the industrial age, a design and aesthetic movement arose, publicly declaring devotion to the pace of city life and its mechanised efficiency. The Futurists, as they called themselves, issued a manifesto for their Machine Age that urged followers to embrace their Modernism. Futurism, although short-lived, had impact. More influential still, Modernism has been less easy to throw off. We continue to suffer its consequences in the form of unsustainable building practices, ego-centric designs and the hard, rectilinear forms it espoused and we have inherited. What we need now, is a new manifesto, for a new age. Like Futurism and the Modern Movement, the Green Movement has arisen in response to a changing world. And like Futurism, it too can benefit from a manifesto, or multiple manifestos, to disseminate its aims. Ironically, many of the tenants of such a Green Manifesto would be opposed to the excesses and naiveties of the past. A manifesto both tracks our progress, and premeditates it. It is a brave and open statement of intent. It is also a means of inspiring others. Which is why we have asked an eco-architect, a designer of sustainable furniture, and two product developers who work with recyclables to qualify, in their own words, their values and actions in relation to the objects they produce for this world. Presenting, their green manifestos:
my furniture
Haldane Martin's furniture comes with its halo intact: it utilizes "clean" steel, recycled plastic and sustainable timber and revives traditional craft techniques, keeping those skills alive. His pieces say a lot about their creator. Here, their creator says a lot about his pieces…
I strive to offer a sense of belonging to our world and the times we live in by creating contemporary pieces of furniture that strongly express our emerging South African identity and human-centred values.
As a contemporary designer I try to meet the needs of the whole human being by designing furniture that is simultaneously meaningful for the spirit, beautiful for the soul, and nurturing for the body.
Spirit
We need our environments and the objects that populate them to reflect our deeper intelligence and wisdom as human beings. Referring to our shared cultural history has been a way that I have incorporated meaning into my work. Personifying objects is another way of expressing myself as a creative human being. I believe that discovering this kind of intelligence in what surrounds us brings light to the human spirit.
Soul
We are all sensitive to a universal sense of balance, harmony, movement and proportion. We can be more easily at peace with ourselves when beauty is present in our lives. I seek to develop my personal faculties of beauty by spending time studying nature, art, architecture and music. Most importantly, I strive to cultivate a healthy inner life. It is an artist's soul that touches the world.
Body
Here I stretch my definition of the body to include the body of the earth. To nurture the physical body I explore the principles of ergonomics and lifestyle. To nurture the earth, I seek to understand the principles of natural systems and to encourage their application in our human systems. Our home should support life on all levels.
By striving to meet the needs of the whole human being in an integrated way, I hope that my work creates a sense of belonging for all those that come into contact with it. - Haldane Martin
Visit www.haldanemartin.co.za.
my lights
Named as the 2006 Elle Decoration South Africa Designer of the Year, Heath Nash excels at making treasures from trash. He turns other people's rubbish into beautiful lamps for other people, and simultaneously illuminates the pressing need for recycling plastic waste. He shares his thoughts behind the design process:
Until I started to research recycling, I wasn't really aware of how beneficial it actually is as an energy- and space-saving activity. Reading through figures and 'factoids' about the positive effects and resource-saving results of a few simple behavioral changes was en-lightening, to say the least; it corroborated my longstanding (yet previously uninvestigated) belief that "recycling is good". Recycling is more than good, it is absolutely essential for the future of our planet, and is a new way of life, rather than some abstract ideal.
I started to design and make things out of old, used plastic containers kind of by accident… as much as anything is accidental. I met my current production manager,
Richard Mandongwe, who is also a very skilled craftsman, at an outdoor market. He was selling some of the most exquisite and inspiring objects I had ever seen: flowers made from old plastic bottles and wire in which I saw a potential that I've been exploring, with Richard as my right-hand man, for the past few years.
At that time (mid 2003), the search was on, for me, personally, to find and/or to create new objects that spoke of my country, South Africa, in a very direct and unequivocal way. I'd come from a Fine Art background, and my design language was strongly based in geometry and crisp, clean lines, facets, folds and cutouts. This was largely due to my choice of materials up until then. I'd really only used paper and other flat substrates as the starting point for all my work.
In making things, I have always used the connection between choice of material (what an object is made of) and the finished object (the way an object looks) as a primary influence. My personal (somewhat Modernist) fascination with 'painting for painting's sake' or the notion of using sculpture as a means of exploring space, immediately came into play when I saw Richard's flowers. The plastic that formed the flowers was not pretending to be anything but scrap plastic, in fact nothing else could behave as this material did. In this lay its immediate appeal. A new and exciting medium had found me. To see these beautiful objects at that specific time opened up a vista of possibilities in terms of a new and unique personal aesthetic - which was just what I had been looking for.
After having started to play with this medium, which is a viable and extremely beautiful one, I have found new ways to deal with the material itself. I encountered unexpected hurdles along the way. I've found different qualities in different types of plastics - there's opacity versus translucency; subtle gradations and differences in colour and thickness; and overlays, like a transparent brown on white for instance - whilst simultaneously battling to find enough raw material to continue with proper production. Some of the coloured HDPE (high density polyethylene) bottles are especially difficult to source, such as purple, light blue and brown, with translucent green being very scarce.
This has restricted my production capacity quite severely. I've been forced to find partners in the simple act of procuring my medium of choice. Very recently I partnered with an environmental organization called Footprints and with the Oasis Association, which runs great recycling centres around Cape Town and now supplies most of my current material needs. I find this unfortunate fact so crazy. I need more rubbish than I can get. And the majority of people around me are just tossing it in the bin - depositing it straight into our landfills, which grow daily, and unnecessarily.
My dream is something like this: To have a centralized 'materials bank' from which to draw as much raw material as I need without having to constantly source and clean mountains of rubbish for myself. In achieving this dream, I am being aided by Footprints in that the organization has dedicated itself to the task of taking responsibility for our environmental footprint on this incredibly beautiful part of the planet. The local situation is improving very slowly, but it's not happening easily, because too few people are making all of the effort. For me, as a designer, it's taking a
lot of time and energy that I should be putting elsewhere - simply because I'm good at other things, like design. In order for any real progress to be made in sustaining our environment, we all need to take individual responsibility and we can at the very least start by each simply taking charge of our personal waste.
I've never really perceived of myself as a leader before, but I've lately come to realise that what I've helped to do, by publicizing the use of plastic waste as a craft material, has been a fairly pioneering move. I've played a role in broadening some people's perceptions of waste. Hopefully this notion will grow, leading to every household in the country separating and cleaning their rubbish, making compost from their organic waste, and re-using those glass jars, shoe-boxes and old computer parts…
Just remember the THREE R's:
REDUCE (the amount of waste you produce)
RE-USE (as much of that excess packaging as you can)
RECYCLE (by learning how to separate your waste, where to drop it off near your home/workplace - being careful of carbon emissions at the same time - and following through by actually doing it).
Waste needn't be wasted. - Heath Nash
my architecture
One of South Africa's first and foremost eco-architects, Keith Struthers of Natural Architecture, builds with sustainable materials like clay, wood, living plants and stone. He has pioneered an organic form of construction specializing in curved walls and roofs that has been documented by a BBC series on eco design. Here, he shares his architectural philosophy and his insights into HOW modern architecture CAN DEVELOP FURTHER
Forming and being formed
As the way I experience and respond to the world matures, so I amend both how and what I design. This growth occurs within the parameters of universal principles. My individual creations continually evolve, whereas universal laws are eternal. In my view, great architecture relies on individual expression that is guided by the universal.
In the case of all designers, their inner world becomes the outer world of others. My human warmth, clarity, inner mobility, originality and liveliness will potentially become someone else's habitat. In this sense architecture is the externalised physiognomy of the designer's inner reality.
This creative influence implicit in the design of a building continues long after the building is completed. Once finished, a building will start to shape its inhabitants from within. We cannot avoid our built environment - unlike permitted colouring E122 and bad music.
Architecture both mirrors and influences our mental, emotional and physical state of being. For example, a six-year research project in Germany used infrared photography to show that our body temperatures increase in building environments that please us and decrease in ones that offend us. This research also revealed that our heart pulse rate, breathing and the size of our eye pupils are also immediately affected by the aesthetic quality of our architectural surroundings.
Buildings affect our health and sense of wellbeing whenever we are near them. They also influence cultural development through stimulating our imagination and refining our artistic sensibilities. This enduring influence originates in whatever - intentionally and unconsciously - inspires the owners, architects and builders; and is embodied in the very fabric and forms of the buildings. When seen in this way, architecture begins and ends within the human being.
The finished and ongoing artwork
Completing a building is the end-product of one creative process and the start of the next. The first process sets up the objective outer structure, which then becomes the medium for the second, our individual inner development. This is the awakening and transforming of our awareness as evolving human beings. The first process reshapes physical substance into something fixed and visible - the building - and the second nurtures the development of something living and invisible - our inner life. Through the influence of the building, not as a symbol or metaphor for something else, but as direct and immediate experience, insights and feelings can surface to consciousness. This process nourishes and supports personal growth. In this sense a building can be seen as both a finished work of art and as a medium for transforming consciousness. Our enduring relationship with buildings kindles this ongoing inner artwork.
The inner path
After realising that designs express both our conscious and unconscious worlds, I naturally feel the need to initiate dialogue between these states of consciousness. And conversely, when I become sensitive to how buildings support self-development, I begin to grasp how healthy self-reflection and inner work are vital to architectural and cultural progress. Understood in this context, architectural practice will include cultivating introspective self-development in tandem with design skills and technical understanding. With architectural progress and personal growth being reciprocally interrelated, we need to nurture both equally.
This leaves us to the question of how can we foster such inner development. One way is by recognising the need for femininity
in architecture.
The need for femininity in architecture
We can start by observing how our masculinity and femininity are expressed, and not expressed, in architecture today. Men and women obviously embody both masculine and feminine tendencies in varying degrees and strengths; nevertheless there are innate gender differences.
It's primarily my femininity, which gives me access to my feelings, to the matters of my heart, to that which helps me integrate my inner and outer life. Our femininity nurtures intimacy, togetherness and mutual support. Its awareness is inwardly focussed and outwardly more dispersed, so outer spatial orientation is more challenging than locating intuitions and feelings. This strengthens our conviction that personal intuitions and feelings are a reliable measure of reality. Our femininity gives us courage to speak our inner truth, to face the reality of emotional difficulties and pain.
In contrast, the archetypal masculine tendency is to change the external world. To think clearly and act with resolve, producing tangible results. Our masculinity competes socially and strives for independence and self-sufficiency. Its awareness is outwardly focussed and inwardly less so, consequently physical spatial orientation is less challenging than issues like 'listening to my intuition and what I must change to feel right.' It leads us with single-minded thinking and consequent actions. This separates us from ourselves, hereby helping us to connect objectively to the outer world. It gives us courage to take risks, to conquer worldly difficulties and challenges.
We currently live in masculine-dominated surroundings. Industrialisation is mainly a masculine-directed activity that involves machinery, assembly lines, emotionally-sterile production methods... The founders of modern architecture, all men, envisaged their functional buildings as the standard global uniform of the future. Their influence has been widespread - rectilinear forms, utilitarian materials, straight roads lined with regimented apartment blocks and steely cold offices abound. Their dictum was: designs should be logical, rational and pragmatic, with no trace of sentimentality or whimsical romanticism here.
On the upside, this attitude has brought a crisp cleanliness to architecture, a clear-headed quality, and a sharpened sense of self-determination. The price tag for acquiring these qualities includes experiencing buildings that are disconnected from past value systems as well as their surroundings. Modernist houses are conceived of as machines for living, constructed in concrete, steel and glass. The result is no gentleness, no homeliness, no warmth and no perky frivolity. This is serious men's business. Sadly, most female architects and planners emulate their male counterparts, adding little of their feminine uniqueness to the design process.
So what is an example of a feminine quality, accessible to both men and women, which if initiated into architectural practice would radically alter our built environment? This is more than a question of what women can do in architecture that men cannot, it's also the issue of what men can do that they have never done before.
The dynamic balance
Integrating our feelings into the design process will radically change how and what we design. Feelings touch us when our rational thoughts are placed in the background. Equally, rational thinking is only effective when feelings are marginalised. Despite the fact that thinking and feeling are different in nature, they both have their own implicit consistency and ordered coherence. However, they have not enjoyed equal respect in the world of science and architecture.
To grasp the world objectively, the classical scientists strive to eliminate any subjective influences arising from their feelings. In a similar way the Modernist architect also strives for a measure of logical objectivity. The success of this rational methodology is only partially achieved in educational institutes because it is at variance with human nature.
A rational imperative does not consciously precede our normal way of living. Falling in love, for instance, lacks 'intentional design considerations'. When students and architects are asked to explain the reasons for their designs it's often a case of post-analyses posing as prior insight. To imagine only our conscious mind is active while living and designing is naïve.
The many-sided nature of our being is neither nourished nor expressed through this one-sided rational methodology, and will at some point seek expression. Living reality cannot be expressed through thoughts alone. The opposite tendency in isolation is also problematic. Unbridled spontaneity and emotional expressiveness lacks inherent cohesion, and can veer off into an isolated world of eccentric personal idiosyncrasies with little relevance to cultural development as a whole.
Aesthetic perception
Ideally when designing, if my creativity is sourced from a dynamic relationship between my thinking and feeling, then this integration will, via the building as medium, be stimulated in the occupants. Expressed differently, when my enlivened thinking functions in concert with my most delicately nuanced and refined feelings, the result will be a vibrant and integrated creative work.
In everyday design practice, when we have understood the design requirements of a project, there arises through our femininity the intuitive need to discontinue just forming thoughts, and to move on to artistic creativity. Ideas are allowed to progress to a certain point and are then followed with an artistic sensibility, before I return to practical construction considerations. This process involves transfiguring reality into something beautiful, as different from merely manifesting a concept.
When matter is simply used to embody a concept, we produce abstractions or kitsch. Here, rational thinking has suppressed artistic imagination. When the initial design process terminates with rational thinking, then the warmth, astuteness and inspiration of the heart are foregone.
Through our femininity, the scope of our artistic expression can be expanded beyond what's possible with our intellect alone. Architecture is not only a science, it's also an art: with the science of aesthetics as the higher synthesis of these apparently irreconcilable disciplines.
The fundamental question for me is: how do I objectify my subjective experiences so that they do not lose their inner vitality and individuality, and yet become a reliable source of insight and creativity? This requires transforming my intimate personal experiences into an empirical instrument; that is, purifying and refining my feelings, my most subjective inner sensibilities, into an organ of aesthetic perception. A prerequisite for advancing this process is the ongoing inner marriage between my conscious and unconscious worlds, between my thinking and feeling, and between my own masculine and feminine qualities.
- Keith Struthers
our products
The Kommetjie Environmental Awareness Group (KEAG) steers Ilithalomsa, a project that evolves the litter that gets washed up on our beaches into desirable sculptures and homeware products. Ilithalomsa's manifesto is jointly presented by Wally Petersen, KEAG's director; Monique Fagan, artist and product developer; and Yandiswe Mazwane, the project manager
Wally
The Kommetjie Environmental Awareness Group manages a number of environmental projects on the southern Cape Peninsula. The largest of these projects is the Working for the Coast Project run in partnership with the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism. KEAG employs over 90 people in this project involving litter cleaning and maintenance work along the beaches between Chapman's Peak and Strandfontein pavilion.
Hundreds of bags of litter are removed from the beaches every month. What alarmed us was the large amount of non-recyclables collected, especially plastics. Due to the huge pressures we have on our landfill sites around Cape Town we decided to investigate the option of making crafts from the collected rubbish - but what could we make? Then on Scarborough beach our team came across local artist Monique Fagan.
Monique
When I first came across the KEAG beach cleaning teams, I thought: "Oh no!", as the rubbish on the beach had become a resource for me as I was making sculptures out of junk. Wally approached me with the idea of creating reproducible, functional and saleable products that his teams could make. We decided to set up a workshop with a number of the workers who expressed interest in the concept. Yandiswe Mazwane, at this stage one of the beach-cleaning supervisors, was chosen to run the project.
Yandiswa
It was very exciting for us to meet Monique at the workshop and to see the wonderful ideas she came up with for transforming junk into fascinating products. In these early days the project had identified six potential crafters, all of whom were excited by the idea of using the collected rubbish constructively.
Monique
I designed and made a number of prototypes using the most commonly found items, which proved to be plastic bottles and lids. Before the training started I liaised with Tracy Rushmore from the shop African Image, to assess whether these crafts would have a market. Tracy readily gave advice and the training workshops began. It is important, from a product-development point of view, that you have access to the resource and a clear idea of what you are going to do with the finished products.
Yandiswe
We realised the potential of this project when African Image bought the first crafts that we produced. It represented a wonderful way for us to supplement our income. We decided to call our group "Ilithalomsa" after the Xhosa word meaning a new dawn.
Wally
The name is apt in that not only have the crafters been given a new lease on life but so have the discarded pieces of rubbish. It is fascinating to watch how the various pieces of rubbish are transformed. Nothing goes to waste. We have turned plastic bottle tops into a precious resource. Our first workshops were sponsored by the Claremont Rotary Club and as the project grew it has at times also been subsidised by the Levi Strauss Foundation and the Western Cape Community Chest.
Yandiswe
The project now supports 16 people from the townships of Ocean View and Masiphumelele. We now have over 20 different products and we mostly work with a variety of plastics. It really is great fun. We sing and laugh as we work and even dance if someone drops off colourful plastic. People have stared collecting resources for us all over and this is recycling at its best. We really do enjoy our work. Most of us are uneducated and being part of this growing project makes us feel very professional, especially when people like our products.
Wally
The number of shops we supply has continued to grow. Moyo at Spier is now one of our biggest outlets. In this regard, Mare van Noordwyk has been a huge help. We have also exported our products to a market in Barcelona and a shop in Australia. On 17 May 2006 we officially opened our craft shop called Junk Evolution on Imhoff Gift Farm close to Kommetjie.
Monique
The items we make are carefully assessed in terms of labour and cost. We try to create a range of products. Some products are quick to make and can be sold cheaply, but we also try and make some "wow" products that showcase our potential.
Yandiswe
Earlier this year we had a stand at the Design Indaba Expo in Cape Town. This was a wonderful opportunity for us and from this exposure our project was filmed for the SABC programme Top Billing. The publicity that has spun off from the Design Indaba has meant that this winter we are going to be very busy. It is very exciting to be part of this growth, please visit our shop and see us at work.
Monique
Being involved with Ilithalomsa has been very satisfying. Remember to love what you do or do some-thing else.
To contact Ilithalomsa, please phone Yandiswe at (021) 783 3433 or Wally at 082 824 1914, or e-mail keag@ct.lia.net.
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