Tag: south africa

• Die Es

  

  To celebrate the launch of their Guide to Cosy Homes (2015), Monocle Films produced a number of home tours. 

  Die Es, pictured above, is the home of South African architects Gawie and Gwen Fagan. They started building their home in 1964, just as they were starting their practice. 

  Because of this, they had little money and had to do a lot of the work themselves. They sold their car to buy a concrete mixer.

  Although they didn’t set out to explicitly design a “Cape” house, it ended up that way, with heavy thermal masses, white walls, and so on. 

  The architecture also relates very closely to the surrounding landscape – as it should – in the way in which it frames views of the water and mountains. 

  The mediterranean climate also really comes through in the materiality of the home and the connections to outside.

  If you’d like to watch the 5 minute tour of Die Es, click here.

  2017.02.17

• Snowboarding, vlogs, Cape Town, and marketing

  This morning, instead of my usual routine of writing alongside a cup of coffee, I decided to finally edit all of the skiing and snowboarding footage that I took last month in Park City, Utah. Click here for the final cut.

  

  Compared to the video we did for Jackson Hole, I don’t like the selfie perspective as much. It doesn’t show enough of the person. This time we used the Go Pro 3-way arm, but in Jackson we used a plastic tube that I think was used for a beer funnel before that. Next year we’ll go back to that.

  Video is a lot of fun and I would love to figure out a way to incorporate more of it into this blog. But that’s a far bigger time commitment and I am not prepared to allocate resources to that. I write every day. That’s my thing.

  I am, however, not ignorant to what’s happening in the world of video blogging. And I think there are lots of opportunities for businesses who have the resources to allocate towards projects like this.

  Take for instance this vlog by New York video guy Casey Neistat. It’s probably the best piece of marketing that the Phantom 4 drone could have asked for. It’s authentic. I watched it and now I want one. Take my money. 

  (Note to city geeks: It’s worth watching just for the drone aerials of Cape Town, South Africa.)

  

  To my knowledge, I don’t think people are doing anything like this in the real estate business. But eventually it will happen. Because people are becoming increasingly immune to your typical marketing pieces.

  2016.03.25

• Real estate and house music in Johannesburg

  I’ve written about the Ponte Tower in Johannesburg before. At 54 storeys, it is the tallest building in Africa. It’s located in Hillbrow, which is an inner city neighborhood known for its crime and poverty. 

  In the 1970s when the tower was built, Hillbrow was an Apartheid-designated white-only neighborhood and the tower was filled with affluent residents. But that didn’t last long and eventually the wealth fled for the suburbs.

  Here’s a brief 6 minute video talking the Ponte Tower. Let’s call it the real estate perspective. Click here if you can’t see it below.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EIKmmSifqw?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  Now, here’s a Real Scenes documentary talking about the thriving electronic music scene in Johannesburg. I think it’s fascinating to look at a city from a particular subculture and, compared to the first video, I get a very different feel for the city. Click here if you can’t see it below.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykt2f6o7-e8?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  2015.05.21
• [vimeo 51295174 w=500 h=281]

  I just came across this fascinating mini documentary of the 54-storey Ponte Tower in Johannesburg. It’s by filmmaker Philip Bloom and it’s only about 10 minutes long. It does a great job of summarizing the building’s interesting and checkered history.

  Initially built in 1975, the tower first served as luxury apartments for the rich. The cylindrical tower, which is actually hollow in the middle, became quickly known as the place to live for the well to do.

  But its architecture very much reflects the political climate at the time. Whites lived in the outward-facing units and their servants, and likely other blacks, lived in the grim inward-facing ones.

  However, when Johannesburg got hit with the same white-flight that plagued many American cities after the war, the tower and area rapidly declined.

  Ponte City, as it was referred to at the time, then became known for crime, drugs and suicide (this will become obvious when you see the inner core of the building).

  It’s worth a watch.

  (Source: http://player.vimeo.com/)

  2013.11.08