Paper short abstract:

The current polemic in Southern African architecture revolves around a 'South African style' yet has achieved little. This paper presents the new vernaculars, constructed without recourse to officially recognised doctrines, but ones which are truly representative of a new middle-class South Africa.

Paper long abstract:

The architecture of the everyday is constantly evolving, subscribing to the requirements of society and determined by material and fashion. In settled, established countries with obvious and long-determined social stratification there is limited scope for drastic change in the quotidian vernacular, restricted as it is by standard norms derived from tradition, in addition to a strictly imposed legal framework which controls building design and implementation.

However, for societies which have recently experienced significant change, new vernaculars are more overt. In South Africa, a rapidly expanding black middle class is unilaterally establishing its own hybridised, often experimental vernacular, utilising a neo-classical toolkit to replicate affluent homes constructed in themed gated estates, defying the now marginalised colonial aesthetic and its reactionaries. At the same time, the architectural profession ponders appropriate buildings forms for the sub-continent. This paper discusses these hybrid vernaculars, suggesting that the role of the articulate profession in the polemic of relevant architecture is redundant in the face of the production of mass architectures by the inarticulate new middle class.