red location museum

The Red Location Museum starkly portrays the use of the above discussed factors which shape and ecosystem: relationships, pattern and form, networks, self-organisation, flexibility and diversity. It is a modern museum located in a favela, slum or ghetto, and is an important site of South Africa’s struggle for freedom. The design evolved from an unconventional approach, innovative use of space and materials, relativity to its vernacular and bold twist of the human experience in and around the building. By studying the Red Location Museum as a precedent, ‘Yeva’ could extract its unique characteristics and exploratory use of shape, form and function to assists guide and profile decisions.

The museum is designed deliberately to confront conventional views of museum design, drawing from the work of Andrea Huyssen, Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, who has written extensively of the concept of memory versus history. Visitors are not treated as consumers but as active participants. The convention of representing history as a single story is challenged and turned on its head. The museum treats the past as a set of memories that are consciously disconnected yet bound together by themes through drawing together separate strands of the struggle that mark the attempts by different south African groups to free themselves. The lesson of the Red Location is that South Africa is a country with a tumultuous history marked by the striving of various groups to be free. However, the freedom of one group should never come at the expense of any other - to be free is to be able to offer others the possibility to be free.

In a similar way, 'Yeva' is a unconventional approach to the established education system, striving to bring new, fresh and living solutions to the existing ‘dead’ method primarily employed worldwide. Within 'Yeva', visitors, staff and students will also be treated as an active and integral part of the design. By employing interactive resolutions, spatial narrative and establishing an encouraging space, people become more than just consumers or experiencers of the design by facilitating to complete it. This help to shape a diverse and flexible design, imperative to an ecosystem to ensure its survival and adaptability to changing time and circumstances.

Neoro Wolf Architects used the idea of the Memory Box to put across the concept – twelve 6x6x12m tall boxes are housed in the main exhibition space. The boxes draw their inspiration from the highly treasured memory boxes that migrant workers used to fill with objects that documented the tragic, insecure quality of a life uprooted from rural areas and transplanted to the city to work on the mines - the only reference the migrants had to the past and families, now seen only once a year. As cultural objects, the boxes have become highly prized – decorated in different ways to represent the diverse cultural, religious and other reading of life in South Africa. The Museum of Struggle is effectively a series of twelve mute, unmarked, rusted boxes offering different and varies readings and memories of struggle in South Africa – undifferentiated from the exterior, but each one’s unique contents only revealed on entry.

No sequence exists – the contents and themes of the boxes are deliberately juxtaposed to create a total experience in each. The spaces between the boxes are spaces of reflection that bring one into the present time – called ‘the twilight of memory’ by Andrea Huyssen. The innovative use of objects and ideas deeply embedded into the people and environment surrounding the museum, as well as shaping its reason for existence, aid 'Yeva' in her quest for establishing a space which reflect the vernacular of the building, its history, its site, and its people. The quality of unexpected surprise are also drawn from the Red Location Museum and used to shape 'Yeva' into an unpredictable space which capture, enthral and provoke. In so doing, varied relationships are created between functions, materials, use of space and viewers – creating a network of elements which support, enhance and rely on one another such as in a natural ecosystem.

The Red Location Museum consist of an auditorium, library, art gallery and offices, a memorial space to commemorate local heroes of the struggle, and a tomb for Raymond Mhlaba, a national struggle hero. Formal design influences are drawn partly from documentary artefacts, such as artworks and posters depicting the struggle for freedom. The building’s saw-tooth roof is a recurring theme in trade union posters from the 1980’s.

Materials are chosen to reflect those used in the surrounding areas of the Red Location and New Brighton. The materials are given new dignity: standard steel windows are used in unconventional ways; the corrugated sheets on the Memory Boxes are intentionally rusted (whence the red colour inspiring the name ‘Red Location’); and the concrete blocks traditionally used in township houses have been used very precisely as ‘clay facebricks. The way in which the museum ‘grow’ from its landscape – experienced in the sophistication and solidification of the pergola from its furthest point towards the building – will be used to modify the facade of the existing 1950’s warehouse into a more open, embracing and integrated part of its exterior.

the inages and information could never show the unique quality of the design - only a visit will;)