Public Lecture - Oct 28th, 2026 - 18:00 - "Learning from Rome and Venice" Prof. No毛leen Murray - (University of the Western Cape, South Africa)
On 28th Oct., 2026, Prof. No毛leen Murray (University of the Western Cape, South Africa) will give a talk entitled "Learning from Rome and Venice." The event will be followed by a small reception.
Abstract:
Learning from Rome (and Venice) is a series of reflections on an architectural intervention in the African desert in the 1970s in South Africa under apartheid. Long since abandoned for a newer complex, the Steinkopf Community Centre's principal architect, Roelof Uytenbogaardt, drew inspiration for the building from time in Italy. He won the Prix de Rome and lived and travelled in Italy from 1957-1959, around the time that American architect Robert Venturi was also a Rome Scholar. Venturi and his partner Denise Scott Brown, along with Steven Izenour, would later develop their seminal field study Learning from Las Vegas in which they literally drew a line of reference back to Rome. No毛leen Murray is a Cape Town based architect and academic who has worked on the archive of Uytenbogaardt since his death in 1998, and for the past 15 years she and photographer Svea Josephy have been documenting his buildings in their current states, and afterlives.
Speaker Bio: No毛leen Murray is a South African architect at Design Matters Architects in Cape Town and a Professor at the University of the Western Cape, in South Africa. This presentation is from her forthcoming book titled A Concrete Suggestion: The life and work of Roelof Uytenbogaardt which is the culmination of 25 years of work on an assembled archive around South African modernist architect, and South African Rome Scholar Roelof Uytenbogaardt's work and influence in South Africa. Other key publications include Desire Lines 鈥� Space, Memory and Identity in the Postapartheid City (2007); Becoming UWC, Reflections, pathways and the unmaking of apartheid鈥檚 legacy (2012), Hostels, Homes Museum, memorializing migrant labour pasts in Lwandle South Africa (2014), and Creative Cities in Africa: Critical Architecture and Urbanism (2023), co-edited with Jonathan Cane.
