initiations

A roof wetting is the end of the process of the design of a building. In recent times it suggests the passing over of the building from the control of the architect and builders to its owners. The practice apparently came from a medieval custom of throwing a party when the main roofbeams had been lowered together to meet. But there’s also the belief that after a roof was finished, the men would all drink a lot, climb the roof, undo their breeches, and collectively test its resistance to liquid. In Africa, new buildings are greeted with parties and acknowledgments to their ancestors.

Most cultures leave buildings to decay when their life is over. But sometimes there are more abrupt endings. In African practices of inititiation, the hut used to shelter initiates is burned down after they leave.

The beer hall has been initiated in this way before, in 1976, when the youth of KwaThema set it alight in protest against the state’s monopolist control of alcohol sales, and the destructive social patterns of institutionalized drinking.

By burning herbs gently in the corners of the building, the students and community suggested that the building was being renewed, while recalling, through the trails of smoke, some sort of connection to its previous lives.

The chess park is sited next to what was planned as a buffer zone to separate white owned land from the township. The symbolism of chess suggests both the blurring that warfare can bring about and the possibility of erasure, of one space being taken over by another. The resurgence of the little park around the chess board as a vibrant public space on Saturday was a vivid illustration of how the non-spaces of the modern apartheid city, spaces designed to separate communities and water down urban friction, contain the potential for a rich public life.

The launch on Saturday doesn’t end the KwaThema Project, but it marks a moment where the projects designed and executed by the students shift their status. The event suggested an appropriation, an incipient life for the spaces, that will unfold in ways we haven’t predicted. Already little traces have been left: someone wrote FALLEN HEROES on the road outside the beer hall, and already, someone else called for that same person to be arrested for recycling the beer crates.

The KwaThema project is a sort of initiation for the Wits students because in becoming an architect, you're considered wet behind the ears until you get your first building built. So the cause for celebration is multiplied.

I guess the conclusion this brings me to is the sense that you just had to be there. It was a great day in a wonderful project. We'll post all the thank yous over the next week when we finally recover.