ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes the underlying concern for comfort and care that Arts and Crafts architects showed to the imagined inhabitation of their buildings by ‘users.’ Parker and Unwin's description of House Goodfellow/Chetwynd in The Art of Building a Home is taken as exemplary of this imagined care as the writing recounts the design moves made that best accommodate comfort. This is also exemplified through the predominance of inglenooks in Arts and Crafts houses. These examples are set against the lack of care and almost discomfort that AJ Thompson, Parker and Unwin's protégé, designed for a new hostel in Langa township which was imagined as a Garden City suburb at the solidifying of urban segregation in Cape Town. In the 1980s, architects were conflicted by the lack of comfort and development in townships but were loath to aid the apartheid state, especially considering the Architects Against Apartheid movement. The resulting approach to comfort was minimal ‘armature architecture’ and a kit-of-parts tectonic assembly that aimed to disappear the intervening hand of the architect behind ‘the grid.’ These approaches are demonstrated and pointed to in the 1990s ‘Dignified Places Programme’ of interconnected David Crane inspired urban armatures in Philippi township.
