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The question of what constitutes art, where expression ends and meaning begins, remains unresolved. Architecture sits uneasily within that debate.
Dani Reimers, Principal at SAOTA and globally awarded architect, offers the Met Gala as a lens for architecture, not because buildings and garments are equivalent, but because both operate through projection and interpretation.
“The Met Gala can be viewed as a performance of surfaces or secondary skins, which allows it to be a useful lens for thinking about architecture. We encounter buildings the way we encounter dressed bodies; as projections of identity, of aspiration, of social position.”
However, the comparison holds only to a point. “The difference is that fashion has no pretence of permanence, which grants it a freedom architecture rarely allows itself. Architecture is required to endure. It must account for time, use, and consequence.”
Dani Reimers, Principal at SAOTA and globally awarded architect, offers the Met Gala as a lens for architecture, not because buildings and garments are equivalent, but because both operate through projection and interpretation.
“The Met Gala can be viewed as a performance of surfaces or secondary skins, which allows it to be a useful lens for thinking about architecture. We encounter buildings the way we encounter dressed bodies; as projections of identity, of aspiration, of social position.”
However, the comparison holds only to a point. “The difference is that fashion has no pretence of permanence, which grants it a freedom architecture rarely allows itself. Architecture is required to endure. It must account for time, use, and consequence.”
“The parallel I would draw is not between fashion and architecture as artistic objects, but between fashion and architecture as performance,” says Reimers.
What matters, then, is not the object, but the encounter. “Both are, at their best, acts of making the body, be it the individual or the collective, visible to itself in a new way. The Met Gala dress that stops you in your tracks is doing exactly what a great building does: it reorganises your expectations of what engagement with the human frame can mean.
The great intrigue around architecture is related to experience. Its central task is not just shelter, structure, or program, but the staging and choreographing of an encounter between a body and the world. In this reading, architecture is neither reducible to function nor justified by form alone. It is defined by what it reveals through experience.”
What matters, then, is not the object, but the encounter. “Both are, at their best, acts of making the body, be it the individual or the collective, visible to itself in a new way. The Met Gala dress that stops you in your tracks is doing exactly what a great building does: it reorganises your expectations of what engagement with the human frame can mean.
The great intrigue around architecture is related to experience. Its central task is not just shelter, structure, or program, but the staging and choreographing of an encounter between a body and the world. In this reading, architecture is neither reducible to function nor justified by form alone. It is defined by what it reveals through experience.”
Architecture carries its own anxiety within the broader debate. “The anxiety about architecture ‘becoming too artistic’ or ‘losing itself in performance’ is essentially an anxiety around use-value, perhaps a residue of modernism’s guilty conscience. Almost a century ago Mies van der Rohe built some of the most ‘use-less’ rooms in the history of architecture and we still fawn over them. The Barcelona Pavilion is almost entirely without function; however, it performed a new geometry of openness, a new relationship between inside and out, a new understanding of what a material surface can be. This is its architecture.”
“The danger I would highlight is not expression overtaking function, but performance overtaking experience. When architecture becomes merely clever, when it is a formal exercise that rewards only the design connoisseur, it fails because architecture is a public art. It is made in and for the world. The line I would draw is between architecture that reveals something: about material, about light, about the relationship between the building and its ground, and architecture that signals sophistication. The first is art. The second is branding.”
“The danger I would highlight is not expression overtaking function, but performance overtaking experience. When architecture becomes merely clever, when it is a formal exercise that rewards only the design connoisseur, it fails because architecture is a public art. It is made in and for the world. The line I would draw is between architecture that reveals something: about material, about light, about the relationship between the building and its ground, and architecture that signals sophistication. The first is art. The second is branding.”
In the South African context specifically, there is something almost ethical about the use of light. Light here is not the diffused northern European grey, that so much of modern architecture was calibrated to manage. It is aggressive, directional, bleaching, and if you work with it rather than against it, it becomes the primary medium. The shadow a wall casts at ten in the morning in Cape Town in summer is as precise and as deliberate as any drawn line. You learn, working in this climate, that form is light management and that the two are inseparable.
“Materials, in our practice, are not neutral substrates onto which architecture is applied. They often have their own arguments. Concrete reads differently under a hot blue sky than under a temperate one. The challenge again is to use the emotional weight of materials to reveal something about the architecture: the relationship to context, culture, craftmanship. That requires a kind of formal discipline that is, in itself, an artistic act.”
“Materials, in our practice, are not neutral substrates onto which architecture is applied. They often have their own arguments. Concrete reads differently under a hot blue sky than under a temperate one. The challenge again is to use the emotional weight of materials to reveal something about the architecture: the relationship to context, culture, craftmanship. That requires a kind of formal discipline that is, in itself, an artistic act.”
Does SAOTA consciously engage with architecture as art? Reimers reflects, “I think the honest answer is: it does both, and the tension between them is generative. There is a body of work that emerges from a deeply technical engagement; from the problem of how to make a building sit on a difficult site, how to resolve a complex section, how to manage the relationship between interior and view in a way that does not simply aestheticise the landscape but actually frames it, gives it back to the occupant as something more than it was before. That resolution, arrived at through rigorous process, produces objects that have the quality of art, not because art was the intention, but because the intention was serious enough to produce it.”
She adds, “But I would also challenge the notion that our work is purely process driven. There is always a sensibility at work, often unique to each of the principals, at times an aesthetic ambition, a commitment to a certain kind of spatial experience that guides every decision from the beginning. This often distinguishes architecture that aspires to art from architecture that merely performs competence.”
In line with artistic pursuit, architecture must hold itself to the standard that art often requires: that the work means something, beyond its brief, beyond its budget, beyond its client's satisfaction.
“Our aim is that it provokes something, however quietly, about what it means to be human in a particular place at a particular moment. This is the definition of architecture that SAOTA vehemently defends,” ends Reimers.
In line with artistic pursuit, architecture must hold itself to the standard that art often requires: that the work means something, beyond its brief, beyond its budget, beyond its client's satisfaction.
“Our aim is that it provokes something, however quietly, about what it means to be human in a particular place at a particular moment. This is the definition of architecture that SAOTA vehemently defends,” ends Reimers.
