by Lindsay Bremner

Storefront for Art and Architecture presents the launching of Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg 1998-2008 with a series of interrogations between the author and different scholars,  including Mabel O. Wilson, Alicia Imperiale and Helene Furján, about Johannesburg and its urban transformations during the last decade.

About the book

Writing the City into Being is Bremner's long-awaited collection of essays, spanning more than a decade of work on Johannesburg. It is both an unflinching analysis of the characteristics of an extraordinary city and a work of imagination - a bringing of the evasive city into being through writing. Johannesburg has become a touchstone in critical thinking on the development of the twenty-first-century city, attracting scholars from around the world who seek to understand how cities are changing in the face of urban migration in all its myriad forms and the inflow of foreign capital and interest. Bremner is at the forefront of this scholarship. Her intimate knowledge of the city makes this a deeply personal but authoritative collection of essays. Writing the City into Being is an important book for those seeking to understand cities in a rapidly changing and fragmenting world. Lindsay Bremner is an extraordinary guide to the city of Johannesburg, and one of its most incisive commentators.

About the author

Lindsay Bremner is Professor of Architecture in the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. She is an award-winning architect and has published, lectured and exhibited widely on the transformation of Johannesburg after the end of apartheid. Her published work on the city include Johannesburg: One City Colliding Worlds (2004), chapters in Johannesburg - the Elusive Metropolis (2008), The Endless City (2008), Desire Lines: Space, Memory and Identity in the Post-Apartheid City (2007), Future City (2005), Under Seige: Four African Cities. Freetown, Johannesurg, Kinshasa, Lagos (2002), blank___architecture apartheid and after (1998) and contributions to Domus, Public Culture, Social Identities and Cities. In her design work, Bremner takes on projects having a socially or culturally transformative agenda, such as her second placed entry to the Freedom Square Competition (with Mashabane Rose Architects, 2002) and the Sans Souci Cinema project in Kliptown, Soweto (with 26'10 South Architects, 2004 - 2007). The latter was awarded a special prize in Bauwelt Magazine's First Work Competition in 2010. Bremner's current research, Folded Ocean: Mutating Territories in the Indian Ocean World is investigating the impact of global mobility, trans-nationalism and environmental change on the human settlements of the Indian Ocean. This will be published in 2A and as a chapter in Writing post national narratives: other geographies, other times in 2011. Bremner was formerly Chair of Architecture at the University of the Witwa-tersrand in Johannesburg. She holds a B.Arch degree from the University of Cape Town and M.Arch and DSc.Arch degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Publisher

Fourthwall Books
English, 2010, 347 pages, 37 colour illustrations, 1 black-and-white illustration
Softcover, 188 x 127 mm
30 copies available for purchase at Storefront during the event
35 USD
ISBN 978-0-9869850-0-3

This publication was sup¬ported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

About The Interrogation Series

The Interrogation Series is part of Storefront's programming for the generation of dialog between "institutionalized" spheres of inquiry and emerging discourses. The events aim to produce multiple and new methodologies of exploration and to ultimately extract a confession or obtain information from certain "suspects" in relation to a particular "crime" (book, building, photograph, thought, etc.) through a series of arguments, questions and-hopefully-answers.