Straight to the point

3 February, 2010

I recently had the pleasure of spending time in Kenya with some good mates of mine who are architectural and interior designers. It so happens that not long ago they were enjoying a mercurial and much-publicized career as fashion designers in South Africa, making it on to the cover of Time magazine. One interesting thing about them is that they have had no training whatsoever.

Couldn’t happen here, you say – and part of me agrees with that point of view; professional designers do need at least a minimal professional framework in which to operate, to protect both their clients and themselves. But there’s another part of me that says, if they are talented and creative enough and have enough good sense to surround themselves with the best professional consultants, then why not?

That was my first thought as I talked to the pair about what they were doing, saw some of their work, and began to understand the range of issues that they face in their professional lives. Issues which designers working in the UK or indeed ‘The West’, as its known, hardly ever have to deal with unless they are building abroad.

But even then, if you work for a UK or European or even US company, even if it has an office in Kandahar or Hangzou, you are still working within your own cultural frame of reference. That’s why it seemed to me that what Geoff Hobbs and Erwin Overkamp are doing, in their own sweet way and for a range of sweet clients you or I would hope to meet only once in a lifetime, could lead to some useful insights into the nature of design in a fast-changing world.

The buildings that H&O design and build must cope with not only the drastic climate, but also the available skills and available resources. The local styles – what one might call ‘vernacular’ – have lasted so long because they don’t need much in the way of technology, they depend on local materials locally sourced, and they can be put together by a labour force with a comparatively low level of technical skill.

The standard approach for domestic and small-scale public architecture is a huge, vaulted roof of makuti grass, laid over a crazily intricate network of casuarina stems and branches, the whole thing flying over an unconnected block house or set of rooms, made of dead coral that comes out of the ground just like stone, only it’s soft like breeze block.

But Hobbs and Overkamp will have none of that. They are fearless modernist messengers, trying to bring straight but sensitive lines and flat, smooth surfaces to the jungle, or in this case the tropical east African coast around Mombasa.

It’s different there, I can tell you. For one thing, it’s just a hard place to actually live and work. Life in the everyday world in Kenya pretty much sucks. Stuff doesn’t work, there’s no air conditioning, everything is old, badly worn and way beyond secondhand.

New mechanical and electrical things like coffee makers and motorcycles are Chinese and therefore crap. (Why has no one has managed to stop them making and selling stuff that doesn’t work – straight out of the box. Is it just me?) It’s dirty and it’s hot and it’s very hard to get around, and getting around is what you have to do a lot of to get things done, because people don’t take what’s said on the phone very seriously, not in the way we do anyway.

There’s nothing quite like a traffic jam in 45-degree heat, sitting motionless among ancient trucks running on adulterated diesel. Then there’s the pervasive corruption – a cultural norm, much as saying ‘excuse me’ is here – that goes with the Victorian-style bureaucracy, a great deal of it blissfully unaware of computerisation. Did I mention the considerable threat to personal safety? Post-election violence a couple of years ago killed more than 275 people, including dozens burned alive as they hid in a church; guards, armed with machete or machine gun, patrol your fence at night.

But it’s a breathakingly, viscerally beautiful country, and its challenge is to make beautiful places to go with it. So here are H&O, struggling against all these daily difficulties to create spaces of memorable form and confident presence.

What else can you find made of straight lines in this country? The normal upland Game Lodge aesthetic ($1,000 a night to photograph wild beasts in the bush from the comfort of a Range Rover) is firmly stuck in the ‘all natural’ department, the curly wurly stick-turned-into-an-incredibly-ugly-stool-ortable approach that you find in Wyoming, Arizona or Texas. H&O’s smooth straight lines, forming sweetly proportioned volumes, picked out and animated with thoughtful and elegant detailing, and designed with as much eco-intelligence as aesthetic sensibility, look like winners to me.

‘Simplicity, symmetry and serenity’, says Hobbs, standing on the well-cut lawn of one of their current sites a few klicks north of Mombasa. But this place doesn’t look or feel like a building site. The plants are thriving and obviously well tended (in the tropics, start with the landscaping is the lesson) the lawn is trim, building mess and waste are practically invisible. All the paths round the 2.4ha plot go in straight lines; we have staff quarters, garages and pump houses all round the perimeter, but no main dwelling yet. The contractor’s people are fined 100 shillings – about a quid – out of their derisory wages (but good money still in that essentially third world economy) if they walk across the corners or pick out the straightest and most sensible line to the tool store or tap.

Erwin shows me with unabashed enthusiasm and pride the rainwater collection and storage systems, and the seawater filtering system that will keep this large house in fresh water for up to a year without benefit of rainfall (a 10-month drought had ended only days before I arrived). Underground tanks can contain a total of 650,000ltrs of water, and the sea-water purification plant can process 600ltrs an hour.

Predictably, insulation against heat loss is not an energy efficient priority in the tropics; what you do with your water is. It’s also noteworthy (and again predictable) that in a country where sunshine is the norm solar powered energy systems are far more pervasive than they are here.

The sting in this tale, and part of H&O’s immediate experience, is that if you install solar-powered energy you have to have massive batteries to store the electricity, and if you don’t maintain those batteries in the efficient, meticulous Western style they’ve been designed for, they will fail and you’ll be worse off than your neighbour with his noisy, noisome generator.

It’s clear that priorities are different for these people and their clients than the ones you or I normally abide by. They also have a tough job getting contractors to understand – or perhaps to respect – what they want. Why go to such pains to keep your architect’s surfaces smooth and his lines straight when you and your forebears have always built with what grows curly wurly and brushy wushy? Why buy a new pair of sandals when you can make them out of your old bicycle tyre?

Kenya, like most countries in the Third world, or hovering between the Third and the First, is more or less built on ‘make do and mend’. There just isn’t the money in the economy to throw stuff away and buy new. It has to be made to work with what they have already, or if not that, then made to work as something else. We (comparatively) rich and lazy Westerners would do well to take note, because we all know in our hearts that our ‘design new, make new, buy new, throw away old’ way of life ain’t sustainable.

The problem is that things made of rubbish tend to look like rubbish, and our sophisticated visual culture won’t abide that. We have to work out how to use and re-use, restrict ourselves to local and available resources, but still make the results look the business, all sleek and shiny. Or change our idea of what looks good.