An architecture tuned into life’s ordinary and spiritual qualities

In what must be as rare as a tjoepstil-early-morning hadeda, acclaimed architect Peter Rich’s house has no front wall or electric fence — you can walk right up to the front door and hit the buzzer.

This epitomises his approach to creating living spaces for people — that there is interactive streetage where they can relate to each other as a community.

Besides that, you can’t miss the house in Parktown — it has a large cairn in the front garden, and the walls are bright turquoise and blue, emulating the bold colours of Ndebele artwork. The reimagined 1918 house is enriched by sensuous, circular mini courtyards, conical stone walls and winding stone paths up the ridge with 360º views, described by Jonathan Noble in The Architecture of Peter Rich: Conversations with Africa as a “hierarchy of courtyards”.

Rich writes on his website: “According to the seasons, the spaces can unite, dissolving the threshold between inside and outside. The curvilinear rough-hewn stone walls of the garden contrast the rectilinear geometries of the house. Embracing the changing light of day, these materials enhance the intimate ambience of the house and garden.”

His CV details his many local and international awards, including international fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects. He has designed homes, community centres, shopping centres, museums and heritage centres, in SA and around the world, where he is well known.

Rich, a youthful 80-year-old, speaks in a stream of enthusiastic consciousness, compassionate and passionate about what he creates. A visit to his house and garden is a spiritual experience that lingers long after the visit.

Entering it from the front door, I found it hard to decide where to focus my attention — it is a sensory explosion. Colours, a large rough stone wall, different ceiling heights and angles, a view right through to the kitchen in an open-plan arrangement but with cosy nooks for a library and dining room, with art everywhere. With three cottages on the property, it can accommodate 14 people, creating his own homestead in the suburbs. “Tighter living can be very, very nice if you do it properly,” he says.

He spent 10 years studying Ndebele homesteads in the 1970s, for his master’s dissertation, and was professor of architecture at Wits University for 30 years. Noble quotes him as saying: “Yes, it was a learning curve … but it’s the best thing a young architect can do.” This is what sets Rich apart — all architects study the contours and positioning of the site, but how many spend time with the communities, getting under the skin of their world view and needs.

He cites communal living examples in India, where he has worked extensively, giving lectures and training young architects. “There are 32 families living on half an acre. They just love it, there’s interaction, social space is thought about, you have your privacy but you can see who’s arriving, there is a nice degree of connectivity.”

But this is changing. “That courtyard system existed across Africa and the Middle East into India, and it’s not there any more, it worked so incredibly well.”

His starting point for a project is to ask people what is important to them. “I go into communities with deference and respect. I say to grannies, ‘I’ve come to learn from you.’”

And testament to this is his Alexandra Heritage Centre, where speaking to the community brought long-lasting benefits. While other structures in the township have been neglected and vandalised, this centre, which is across the road from Nelson Mandela’s back room (his first residence when he came to Johannesburg), has remained intact. It has no encircling walls, and has an open and welcoming feel. Rich rates it as one of his favourite buildings.

When asked about his other favourite buildings, he lists Herbert Baker’s home, Stonehouse, in Parktown, and the Constitutional Court building.

“I think they got it right, it’s a very successful building.” Both buildings use natural elements such as stone, recycled bricks, Nguni hides, and are in perfect harmony with their locations.

“The Stonehouse sequence is astonishingly beautiful the way it receives and welcomes one from below up into its crest of ridge location,” says Rich.

He likes modernist buildings in the city centre too, but also the Art Deco Anstey’s Building, and the grand villa-like style of Whitehall in Killarney.

Perhaps his most memorable building is the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre in Limpopo, for which he received the World Building of the Year award in 2009. Mapungubwe is where the golden rhino, crafted in the 13th century, and discovered in the 1930s, is located, so it seems a fitting place to be acknowledged globally. He’s followed the circular pattern up the hill, with three cairns, an outdoor amphitheatre and curved, timbrel vaulted roof structures made from hand-pressed earth tiles, with no supporting columns. The project used local labour, who received training in brick making and laying. It’s an uplifting, intriguing space, in harmony with the landscape.

“Architecture to me raises the human spirit, it’s not a building, there’s a difference, between mere building and architecture,” he says.

“Mapungubwe opened the door to a new kind of architecture — unadorned, natural, organic and raw,” writes Noble. Two projects in particular capture this, catering to far-flung communities, but sadly never built. The Amazwi Women’s Centre in the Valley of a Thousand Hills in KwaZulu-Natal was to be a museum, event venue and production space for female artists and crafters. Among other structures, the design consists of an egg shape, a symbol of fertility, and a pot, symbolising pottery, one of rural women’s activities.

The other project is the Kanniedood Cultural and Education Centre, near Plettenberg Bay. It was to be a project for the remaining Griqua peoples in a 1920s settlement in the area. Noble states that the “building was to tell the story of the Griqua, their identity, resilience and their claim to First Nation heritage, as well as to interpret the surrounding landscape and to venerate the sea”. It would celebrate the 73,000-year-old stone with cross-stitch scratchings found at Blombos Cave, considered to be the oldest known human drawing. Funding and government support for both projects was not forthcoming.

One of his recent projects, begun during Covid-19, is the Green City in Kigali, Rwanda, bringing together all his thinking on space and communities. “It is called Green City because it obviously takes cognisance of it being sustainable in a multiplicity of ways,” says Rich.

Here too he walked the streets for many years. “I observed what ordinary Rwandees had done, their culture and aspirations.”

Though not yet built for political reasons, it is a housing complex with eight neighbourhoods, housing 24,000 people in two- and three-storey apartments where most people have a garden, but with common areas of connection to neighbours.

“You get a streetscape that relates to neighbours, even within a dense housing arrangement.” It is for first-generation urban African dwellers, bringing the “good manners” from the rural village to the city.

Its sustainability is dictated by several factors: it is close to the East African Rift Valley, so has a Richter scale design component in its foundations; it is on a steep slope; it has a distinct climate with two seasons experiencing storms every afternoon. “Those are the nuances, but then there’s water run-off and retention ponds.” Being on the equator means buildings can face either north or south, and still get sun.

He feels he has, with UK-based architectural firm Feilden Clegg Bradley Studio, designed a complex that “has a sense of belonging, a sense of community, and is sustainable, ecologically sound, given the fact that it’s in a tremor area, and deals with the particularities of the weather and culture”.

He speaks of Italian hillside towns, where people live in proximity. “How do you bring that clustering and sense of belonging back here?” Green City does that. It has won the 2023 Future Masterplanning Award at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore.

“An architect needs first and foremost to enrich the human experience,” he says, adding that he has been embraced as a “culturally sensitive architect” by communities he works with. Surely no-one would dispute that.

Perhaps Noble best sums up what Rich does: “An architecture motivated by observations and drawing, tuned to the circumstantial, the ordinary and spiritual qualities of life.”