Societies, over time and across different contexts, have consistently materialised accounts of their evolving intelligences, beliefs and identities through a series of artefacts as representations of a contemporary culture or zeitgeist. These manifest as personal items, tools, utensils, artworks, clothing, items of adornment, decoration, furnishings or spaces of habitation. This may be a built form, a combination of required places or the greater landscape that a society is sustained by.

 

The city of Johannesburg also assumes a role as material culture, developing over time. It is a rapidly evolving city, with a society whose diverse cultural heritage includes multiple patches, layers, and seams of the indigenous, imported, creolised and evolving cultures of South Africa. This culminates in both a social dynamic and an urban landscape made up of these narratives. Our collective material presence includes our city fabric, as the make-up of the built environment, with the perpetuation of its emergence, evolution and innovation as our collective heritage.

 

This project investigates how contributions might be made to the broader context of evolving city fabric through urban and architectural regeneration interventions amongst the textile ‘patches’ of Fordsburg, in Johannesburg. This is a thriving city-edged location of congruous business and family-life, where industrial warehouses are inter-stitched with deeply-established residential conditions as well as vibrant retail rhythms. The project thus intends to provide a bold urban renewal catalyst that activates the ‘dialogue’ between conventionally separate notions of industry, ‘making’ and process typologies, social spaces, cultural behaviour and representation. This is an insertion that facilitates and documents societal progression and cultural production.

 

The urban environment is, thus, uniquely addressed from a textile frame of reference. An analysis of the nature and craft of fabric as an expressive art form, as well as the use of textile methods of stitch, weave, embroidery, embellishment, seam and hem, develop the base methodology as an open-ended ‘kit of parts’. These are a set of tools used as a lens towards exploring and expressing linkage or relation to building types, forms, materials, structures, pattern, layout, junction, placement, planning and experience. These tools develop city fabric, as articulations derived from textile experimentations. These extend notions of material make-up into appropriate design formulations inclusive of production, cultural exchange, place- making, trade and creative programmes that evoke the possibilities of networking between societal patches.