Balustrades and Bollards

This morning I printed the newspaper and met up with the group who were loading our steel balustrade uprights into Gareth’s trailer. They left to go straight to site, while Robyn and I went to site via Fischer Fixings, where we had a brief meeting with Kerry who helped us specify further fixing details. We then sped off to Kwa Thema, with a very excited Catherine calling us half way there – they had managed to secure the first upright! We arrived in Kwa Thema to find Gareth hard at work drilling and fixing, I’m afraid he didn’t really stop and continued right through the day, the balustrade uprights look fantastic. They are strong, solid and relate entirely to the weight of the structure, while they are well spaced enough to ensure visual and spatial penetrability. The ANCYL guys had made some serious inroads in the creation of many tyre bollards, they look fantastic, and hold the space around the beer hall really well, while protecting any children who might play there. I spent a lot of time chipping away at an obstructive concrete mount, which was quite a rewarding experience. Later during the day, Robyn and Mr. Cindi managed to organise a large front-end loader, this filled the skip which the council gave us, very quickly, and decided to make a huge mound of all the left over rubble and garbage. They should be back tomorrow morning with a truck.

We had a great lunch today in the cool shelter of Lizzy’s shop, far away from the stark sunlight, cold wind and perpetual dust which blasts us all day long. We ate hotdogs and spoke about our progress. In the afternoon Hannah, Tseleng and Peter Le Roux arrived to check on the project. A few comments about the mass of the uprights and their spacing were made, I felt entirely confident about our intervention and am continually spurred on by the positive messages brought forward by those who will benefit from it, the members of the community. Our position in the grand scheme of The Kwa Thema project remains considerably contested, with a minor mark difference (of 0.5) between us and the chess park only fuelling controversy. We are still excited to see this project through, and will require lots of strength and support in the next week, it’s going to be very interesting. We are achieving something amazing which is already appreciated by the community.

This evening we sat down at Stan’s for an ad hoc workshop about the launch event. It was an interesting process, with most of us too exhausted to take it all very seriously. I think the launch will be great, we have been planning ours for some time now. We left Kwa Thema in the dark, to sleep at home and return tomorrow, and almost every day until the end. I don’t know how this can possibly compare to the other design electives. We are doing something so important, so relevant and so completely physical, ethereal elements like assessments and moderations seem so disconnected.