Colonials, protest and aspiration: current polemic in ‘decolonised’ South African vernacular architecture

Determined by material and fashion, everyday architecture constantly evolves to fulfil societal requirements. Countries with entrenched social stratification, restrictive norms informed by tradition and legislative frameworks controlling building design and implementation, limit the scope for change in the vernacular, built environment.

However, in societies experiencing significant transformation, new vernaculars, ‘architectures of the people’, are more overt. In South Africa, a rapidly expanding black middle class adopts lifestyle clues from television programmes such as Top Billing, in creating a vernacular pastiche using a neo-classical toolkit. This produces an aesthetic, spatial, and often experimental, architectural language which supports identity construction and class definition by replicating affluent homes constructed in developer-built gated estates. The action of mimicking the wealthy defies the generative clues in the extant and historic built environment and its reactionaries calling for decolonisation. It also renders the traditional roles of architectural professionals as ‘tastemakers’, irrelevant. This paper discusses these hybridised vernaculars to suggest that the proliferation of Top Billing houses infers that decolonisation of the physical and intangible built environment has in fact, ironically occurred.