politics and perusals

gareth and catherine collected our steel in strydom park at 9:20am. i arrived at the workshop a little late so had missed out on a bit but it was liberating to finally see some material! and it was so sexy! i never thought i would feel so fond of a pile of 100x50mm c-sections! we discussed our way forward and ran our ideas past peter, the workshop manager. everything seemed to be going smoothly.

we drove to fischer to meet with kerry’s brother, richard as kerry was away. we became concerned that the anchors that they have proposed for our balustrade would not be sufficient to hold up the monstrous balusters – but he assured us that they would. upon promising to always, throughout our entire professional careers, specify fischer as the number one fixing, he donated 100 anchors to our project! richard then give us a lesson on rotary drilling and generously lent us their r6000 portable drill. we were overwhelmed by his generosity – not only his actually, but the entire groups’. it seemed extraordinary that such a bunch of people still existed in this world. i can assure anyone reading this, that fischer definitely has a far superior product to others on the market – if only for this reason! we walked out feeling completely overwhelmed.

at 2pm, we began a workshop with bernd and christopher. it was lengthy and at times heated, or should i say, rather intensely discursive! they reiterated their concerns about our lack of process and analysis, and our subsequent failure in making informed design decisions. they spoke about process and networking and the clear distinction between form and modernist attitudes. we were quiet and bewildered by the news. only a week earlier, we had presented to council and had, as we thought, received the go-ahead. why were they throwing this spanner into our works? and why was hannah shifting the goal posts? we have only 2 weeks until our launch! the frustration and disheartenment was huge and the tension between us and them rose. all of our hard work and what we thought was process, seemed to be insufficient for their requirements. it became clear to me that the politics in design and designing politics that they were referring to was not about kwathema and its people or even about the project, but rather about the varying agendas of the people around the table. ifg ulm vs hannah vs us students! our hearts broke and the community’s broke with ours.

we stayed behind to propose a possible r15000 donation from sab to hannah. she suggested we take it for a possible future project. but we knew that they would not give it to us under this pretext.

we left feeling gray.