VOLUMES: Timed Online Book Auction Highlights | Architecture, Apartheid & After

VOLUMES is a special Timed Online sale from 19-26 May, focusing on art books and books by and about artists covering everything from rare and collectible ephemera to reference works and artist’s monographs

Aspire Art's Cataloguers and Researchers have picked their favourite books. 

Bringing together the minds of esteemed architects, writers and artists, Architecture, Apartheid & After (1998) (Lot 9) navigates the political landscape of South Africa’s built environment through a lens of criticality.

As a young South African, engaging with the book’s deconstructed nuances of artificial landscapes is a fascinating confrontation of how physical space was leveraged for power in the early stages of a post-apartheid country. By contrast, this account of contemporary reality aims to cultivate an understanding of space by using city planning as an access point for political awareness. 

The book surveys the remnants of the country’s past, drawing on architecture as a foundation for significant discussions around wealth inequality, racial segregation, invasions, and other consequences of the country’s complicated history.

Using a map to direct the reader to these ideas, the book requires an active interaction, encouraging readers to participate through a physical engagement of map-reading to fully access the critical content. This prompts readers to actively experience the concept of construction conceptually and physically, implying the political significance of the relationship between the abstract and concrete.