ABSTRACT
‘Care’ is foundational to the discipline and practice of architecture. This chapter introduces the disjuncture in architecture between drawing and building as generating a range of anxieties that underpin the architect's approach to ‘care.’ The different modes and practices of care and their imagined impact and efficacy are also pointed out. It also introduces the building as a potential vector for the ethos of care as an instrument of morality. The chapter uses William Morris' News from Nowhere as an introduction to the chapters and themes covered by the book via the protagonist's journey up the Thames to establish the roots of an architecture of care firmly in the soil of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness is used to introduce the potentially disturbing and unsettling darkness that inheres in the two ‘rivers’ of ideas that flow from the Arts of Crafts to Southern Africa as crossing genealogical strands of architectural DNA bedding down and transforming in the delta of Southern Africa.
