bout seven years ago, when my wife
and I were expecting our first child,
my in-laws suggested to us that we
move into their house. We decided
to turn some of the additions into
a garden cottage, which they now
live in, and we moved into the main house.
They had mentioned before that they thought the
house had once belonged to an architect, but, despite
a large chunk of my job being to write about houses
and architecture, I’d not really paid attention.
When we began planning the alteration and got the
plans, it turned out they had been right. The house had
been designed by an architect by the name of Hans J
Schir macher in 1965. It was a clever, exuberant design
- at its heart a low-slung modernist box built with
humble iron-spotted bricks and a flat concrete roof,
but complicated with angled walls and faceted rooms.
It had slim wooden doors that reached to the ceiling
and lovely floating cupboards in dedicated nooks.
I managed to track down Hans – who must have
been about 80 – to Portugal, of all places. I wrote him
a note via his website and he responded, beginning
an on-and-off correspondence that lasted a few years.
As far as I know, he was born in Germany, was raised
in South Africa and studied in New York at the Pratt
Institute. On his return to South Africa, the first thing
he built was a house for himself – ours – which won
him some awards and, on the back of that, his first
commissions, and helped launch what by all accounts
became a stellar career.
He left the country in the late ’80s after apartheid
security police visited him at his house. Along with
Joburg’s pre-eminent architectural historian Clive
Chipkin and a number of others, Hans had founded
an organisation called Architects Against Apartheid,
which led to his being intimidated and eventually flee-
ing the country.
Once, after a long gap, he wrote to tell me he’d read
a little newspaper article I’d written about art dealer
Warren Siebrits and interior designer Lunetta Bartz’s
restoration of the Italian sculptor Edoardo Villa’s house
in Kew. He sent me a scanned copy of an article he’d
written about the same house when it was first built in
the late ’60s! He also mentioned he was planning to re-
turn to South Africa. And then things went quiet again.
When the architect of the late mid-century house Graham Wood lives in died,
he discovered a new way of being at home.
WHEN AN ARCHITECT DIES
By this stage, I’d developed a minor obsession
with the house. I had pored over my copy of Chipkin’s
book about Joburg architecture and uncovered bits of
domestic archaeology and generally speculated about
every little thing.
Some time later, out of the blue, I got a mail from
Hans to say he was in South Africa and, after having
lunch with friends one Sunday, he’d taken a detour
past his old house. I couldn’t believe it! I felt like I was
about to discover all the mysteries of the archi tec ture
and resolved to invite him over, but put it off again
and again in the end-of-year rush, thinking we should
wait until the holidays. But before I got around to it,
I received a group mail from Hans’s wife, Diana, to say
he’d suffered a stroke. He couldn’t
speak. Two years later – December
2018 – I was among the recipients of
another mail: Hans had died.
A subtle recalibration takes place
in a building when its architect dies.
Instead of their speaking for it (some-
thing I’d long hoped I’d be able to
convince Hans to do), sudden ly the
house speaks for them. This shift in
the character of a building seems to
work in two direc tions. On the one
hand, it’s as if certain secrets fuse
or crystallise into the fabric of the
building. And then its spirit seems to travel outwards
again into the web of history. And the silent spirit of the
archi tect seems somehow to take residence.
The house, it seems, has becomes a little less per-
sonal, and we’re less inclined to follow the impulse
to make it our own as to learn to live there. But at the
same time there’s more of a sense of belonging to
a richer, more complex place and history. A new way
of being at home.A
Graham Wood lives in Johannesburg, where he “ended
up” thanks to a combination of love, work and family.
“I have a sort of half-zeal for the place that comes from
being a half-outsider,” he says. “I grew up in a mining town
nearby.” He writes and edits magazine articles about
things that interest him, mainly archi tecture, art and
design. He says the number of houses he has written about
runs into the hundreds. In the mean time he nurses dreams
by turns of launching disruptive entre preneurial ventures
and creating beauti ful books about local architecture.HE LEFT THE
COUNTRY IN THE
LATE ’80S AFTER
APARTHEID
SECURITY POLICE
VISITED HIM AT
HIS HOUSE.37 visi.co.za JUNE/JULY 2019�ISI VOICES