ABSTRACT
This chapter uses two well-known figures to introduce the idea of ‘climate change’ as a dislocation of Europeans into ‘other’ territories, namely the disorientation of Charles Darwin and the bad orientation of Cecil Rhodes on his east-facing home stoep. It shows how Arts and Crafts architects, at the end of the 19th century, had begun to orientate their buildings not only to the sun but also to nature. The same concerns and discourse were evident in Cape Town and South Africa, but it was initially used to justify a Grand Manner classicism that was claimed to be appropriate to the Cape's ‘Mediterranean’ climate. Similarly, Cape Dutch settler architecture was taken as exemplary of a climatically appropriate architecture, despite its lack of a covered stoep or verandah. Domestic architecture at the Cape is shown to have started as English boxy cottage architecture with many fireplaces and to have eventually evolved into a ribbon or L-shaped plan-form with extensive connections to solar orientation and nature through inhabited stoeps and verandahs. Eventually, cross ventilation and solar orientation found its analytical clarity in the Pretoria work of Helmut Stauch and Norman Eaton.
