Versteek in die westelike uithoeke van Pretoria is die oorblyfsels van die voormalige bewaarder van die Weste, vandag bekend as 'Westfort'. Kort voor die Tweede W?reldoorlog uitbgebreek het is die fort gedemonteer, gestroop vir sy staal, en aan totale verval oorgelaat (Van Vollenhoven 1998:25). Hierdie verhandeling spreek die eindelose proses van ru?nasie en isolasie in hoogs bestrede tye van verandering aan. Deur hierdie verlate ru?ne te rehabiliteer, kan Westfort moontlik raaisels van die verlede ontbloot en terselfdetyd 'n behoefte skep om stories daaroor te vertel. The Heritage Portal will act as the mediator in celebrating the continuity of our collective and continuous South African heritage through the experience of narration. The intention of the project is to protect the heritage significance of the Westfort precinct, secure its future value, and introduce continuity through experiential architecture. KEYWORDS: Ruination, collective, experiential, rehabilitate, narration, continuity a Lost and forgotten ruin a Beacon of continuity and belonging Die Erfenisportaal sal as bemiddelaar optree in die viering van ons gemeenskaplike en deurlopende Suid Afrikaanse erfenis deur middel van vertelling. Die intensie van die projek is om die geskiedkundige belang van Westfort te beskerm, om sy toekomstige waarde te bevorder, en om kontinu?teit deur die ervaring van argitektuur bekend te stel. / Mini Dissertation (MArch (Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Architecture / MArch (Prof) / Unrestricted

NDLTD Innovative ETD Award 2012. This dissertation is rooted within a process of unification, a personal struggle to understand the fragile relationship that exists between architecture and time. The project focuses on architecture’s potential to adapt according to the passage of time, through the process of aging and weathering. This study is founded in the aim to re-establish a connection between the continuum of time and architecture. The project places contemporary commemorative architecture under the limelight, criticising the static notion of heritage commemoration through the typologies of museums and memorials. These typologies often evolve into static monuments, where the relevance to contemporary society can be questioned. The architectural response of this dissertation is thus focused on commemoration through everyday use. The proposed historical site (Magazine Hill) forms a comprehensive construct of different layers of time and influence. This mysterious, abandoned and isolated site consists of two ammunition magazines, five bomb shelters and ammunition factories, all structures that represent an era of unrest in South Africa. In 1945 a mysterious explosion of the Central Magazine scarred the face of Magazine Hill, leading the activities on the site to an early death, trapping architecture in time and abandonment. The proposed programme forms part of the conceptual premise of mediation, unifying different opposites inherent in both Magazine Hill and the South African context. A brass foundry is proposed to recycle the spent ammunition shells of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), thereby introducing brass artists as a public interface to Magazine Hill. Where ammunition was once produced, ammunition is now reduced. This programme could form mediation between the public and the military; exposing different layers of the past by reinstating a connection between architecture and time. View Clifford Gouw's video on <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVnn-sDfR_U ">YouTube</a>. Copyright 2011, University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria. Please cite as follows: Gouws, C 2011, Magazine Hill : a weathered continuum, MArch(Prof) dissertation, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, viewed yymmdd < http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-11302011-195515 / > C12/4/86/gm / Dissertation (MArch(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Architecture / unrestricted

This thesis is an ethnographic study of place-making in a war-altered landscape. It describes over a decade of resettlement efforts in a village in northwest Cambodia. As war drew to a close in the late 1990s, land on the former frontlines was allotted to those willing to risk occupancy on possibly mined terrain. Area resettlement was driven by need, forged by hope, and fraught with physical risk and material dangers. Food security and the prospect of acquiring land rights required settlers’ physical presence in and active engagement with the materialities of a forested landscape strewn with the remnants of war and the ruins of earlier settlements. Residents' conceptual and corporeal engagements with place were influenced by longstanding Khmer depictions of the srok, the ordered and cultivated landscape of agriculture and human dwelling, and the prai, the wild and fecund landscape of the forest, replete with powerful but often malevolent spirits. The srok was the landscape that the inhabitants of Handsome village longed to dwell within and struggled to create. The area’s pre-war reputation as a famously fertile agricultural zone had drawn many of its residents to risk the hazards of resettlement. The dream of the srok drove residents' actions in the actively dangerous, ever fluctuating terrain. In addition to being envisioned, the place was intimately known and directly experienced through the corporeal bodies of its inhabitants and their engagements with its material assemblages. Making the srok involved arduous physical effort in a constantly shifting material environment along with concentrated social and conceptual work. Resettlement did not merely entail hewing fields out of forests and removing mines and ordnance, but also encompassed attempts to transition into peacetime—to move from soldiering to farming, to come to rest after years of mobility and displacement, and to recreate social and moral order. This study analyzes successes and failures in place-making processes, illustrating how different aspects of landscape posed both affordances and constraints to these processes. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which material assemblages contributed to uncertainty in place-making efforts, illustrating that the material dimensions of landscape may resist as much as they acquiesce to human alteration. On a material level, place-making was a struggle that pitted human agency and will against an active and agentive landscape. Village residents were interacting with material environs in a constant state of change and becoming. The unsettling material traces of the past and the continuing threat some remnants posed in the present contributed to the ongoing indeterminacy residents experienced about the state and contents of the once famous ground. The landscape that residents sought to form and fix was always in danger of undoing its formation and categorization and revealing itself to be something else. Yet despite their failures at establishing and fixing the srok in the constantly shifting landscape of Handsome village, residents maintained their quest to transform the present configuration of place into the landscape and the future that they desired.

This paper explores specific sites of leisure-swimming pools, movie theatres, hotels, and cafés that were built at the height of colonial tourist aspirations in Beira, Mozambique (1950s-1970s) and that were formally reserved for colonial elites, specifically in this case, Portuguese citizens, British Rhodesian sugar plantation managers who were stationed in Beira at the time, and visiting (white) tourists, and their families. What do these infrastructures tell us about colonial urban planning, including sites of leisure and their histories of racialized restrictions? What can they say about tourism in a (Portuguese) colonial city that was once the centre of the East African corridor and an access point to the ocean for neighbouring (British) Malawi and Rhodesia? That these same swimming pools, theatres, hotels, and cafés are very much in use today by a very different set of inhabitants says something about this „reluctant city“ (Forjaz 2007, 2) in the making. Through my ethnographic observations and impressions during two visits to the city in April 2009 and February 2016 I will attempt to think productively with „ruins of empire“ (Stoler 2008) in order to chart a set of ruminations on acts of renovation in present day Beira. These ruminations are intended to show a complex city in its daily habitus by way of relationships (both of materiality and affect) between people and certain build environments. My focus suggests that these particular sites (and by way of their features such as colours, tiles, fixtures) afford a window onto Beira‘s condition of postcoloniality (as well, the simultaneity of its conditions of colonialism, socialism and war) through the creative ability of its African inhabitants to take specific urban infrastructures left behind by its Portuguese colonial possessors in the wake of Mozambique‘s rapid decolonization in 1975, and adapt them to their own strategic and innovative purposes.

Trümmerliteratur - literally “rubble-literature" - is a brand of literature that became important after the Second World War, led by Heinrich Böll, whom I term the apologist of German Trümmerliteratur. Typically included under this classification are the writers who began to produce in the years immediately following the war, and in whose work the rubble and ruins of the landscape figure prominently. Böll provided the programmatic framework for the movement in his “Bekenntnis zur Trümmerliteratur" but his relationship to another type of ruin writing presents a point of friction when he appears to be working in a romantic mode to describe his experience of Irish ruins. This problem was the point of departure for a new thinking of ruins. Discovering the strains of rubble literature in Grass and Celan presents the second part of this study, which dramatically recasts these writers, demanding that the presence and prevalence of ruin images and themes receive consideration. Grass's hermeneutical ruins, a reading of narrative gaps, presents the first level of ruin, separating the reader from the text's reliability and authorial immediacy. The next type of ruins that Grass presents is the violent ruinating involved in the the act of writing itself, whether chiseled into gravestones or flecking virginal paper. Similarly, Celan's images of ruins are produced in a form consciously resembling berubbled structures, with dashes and slashes often left jutting dangerously into the space of a wide margin, like the rusty reinforcing steel bars of modern construction. Considering these writers in these terms leads to the question of language and how they attempt to overcome the problem of a language manipulated into complicity in the crimes of totalitarianism. Finally, there is the transparency offered in the porous structure of the ruin. These houses prove incapable of providing the shelter or protection. The inhabitants are exposed, exhibited to the observer with all of the intimate contents of quotidian existence, the low objects of the everyday. Entrance into this interiority is a powerful part of what makes the ruins an interesting object for observation. In this literature of ruins and rubble the reader is offered this transparency, an offer of entrance into society's interiority.