Cape Colonial Architecture, Town Planning, and the Crafting of Moden Space in South Africa

Architecture and the built environment in Cape Town provide clues and insight into the spatial models that inform continuities and contradictions in the structuring of rules regulating contact and conduct in urban dwellers' daily routines. This paper explores the transition from classical to modernist space in colonial and postcolonial Cape Town to address some of the tensions informing the use of race and gender distinctions to obscure the relations of production behind the organization of domestic space. It is argued that the transcendent nature of classical space is sustained in the modernist moment, but is obscured, in part, through the abstraction of rules separating public and private spheres of the body and the built environment. Transcendence is shifted from the divine to the secular through the incorporation of scientific principles of efficiency and hygiene into the definition and building of proper working-class housing.