Q&A with Floris Smith

Smith knew he wanted to be an architect since he was 15 yrs old
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Examining the differences between streets and roads & the similarities between a city and a home

Even as a young boy on his grandfather’s Johannesburg farm, DSA Architects’ newest director of architecture, Floris Smith, knew he wanted to be an architect. A fascination with practical pieces of machinery and a talent for freehand drawing combined to show him the architectural light at the tender age of 15. Mentored by people like Aldo van Eyck and Edmund Bacon at the University of Pennsylvania, where he attained his Masters degree, Smith returned to South Africa to become a young partner—and eventual chairman—of the prominent South African firm of Meyer Pienaar & Partners.

That was in the 1980s, when contextualism in architecture was a relatively new discovery for South Africa.

Smith admits to us that that was when he realised buildings were part of a larger urban fabric and that built space and public space required thoughtful integration. The lessons he learned under the careful tutelage of Penn’s architectural greats were invaluable then and continue to serve him in his work today.

He gave Middle East Architect an hour of his time.

Who inspired you?

FS: Louis Kahn. He played a massive role in the development of South African architecture. During the late 1950s and early 1960s a number of South African students did their Masters degrees at the University of Pennsylvania in Louis Kahn’s studio. Two of them happened to be my erstwhile partners: Willie Meyer & Francois Pienaar.

Kahn was a great architect. I really admire his work. He built fantastic buildings. So he was a great inspiration. That was also the reason why I followed in their footsteps and went to Penn. There was a tradition in the firm.

Aldo van Eyck, the Dutch architect, came from a different direction but he espoused similar values in architecture, which had to do not with the form, but with the underlying principles. If I design an office building, it’s not merely an office building; it’s a place of work. The design of any building is simply the final expression of a fundamental realisation about what that building is really about.

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FS: First, it’s to realise what you’re actually working with in an archetypal sense. If you do a school or university, you’ve got to understand, in a spiritual sense, what that’s all about.

Then you’ve got to consider the site. You’ve got to relate the building to where it is on the planet so you’ve got to consider climatic and ecological issues as well. Then, you’ve got to understand the client’s objectives. I see design as a process through which you achieve clearly stated objectives. The objectives may be defined by the client, the architect or the public. All those things have to come together. Really good architecture satisfies all three of those parts of the equation: client needs, public needs and architect needs.

Critics say contemporary Arabian architecture is an exercise in kitsch. Your thoughts on that?

FS: I think its fair criticism and I think it would apply to many projects in the region. We’re involved in a number of private villa projects where the clients want to express them in a sort of Andalusian or Moorish style. We accept that as a directive but before designing anything, we study the principles in that architecture very carefully.

It’s too easy to just take a building and slap a style onto it. That’s like wallpaper architecture. At DSA we go beyond that. Because of our research-based approach, we consider ourselves like a radio: You can put us on any station and we’ll play.

A colleague of mine once told me, ‘There’s no such thing as bad architecture, there’s only bad architects’. In the hands of a good architect, a building can achieve any style. Just by giving it the right proportions, balance and composition, you can elevate it to a much higher level. It all depends on the talent of that particular designer.