POSTMODERNISM AND ARCHITECTURE AT THE END OF APARTHEID

323pp., illus., paperback, Routledge, Abingdon, 2026 

ISBN: 9781041193074

Hilton Judin examines postmodernism in 1970s and 1980s South Africa, uncovering connections between architecture and apartheid and demonstrating how local planning and design practices reflected architects’ choices between complicity or resistance.

He discusses critical voices of the period, including Robert Venturi, Paolo Portoghesi, Colin Rowe, Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, and Kenneth Frampton; questions of resistance in different forms and mediums, from the literature of Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee to grassroots struggle and community participation, and the contributions brought by architects in South Africa to a global postmodernism.

"South African architecture – colonial, deco and high modernist – have produced iconic reminders of its complex past. In this remarkable treatment of post-modernism, our foremost interpreter of South African architecture, Hilton Judin interprets this style as the ‘last salves lamentably applied to a wounded nation’." Saul Dubow, Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History, Cambridge University, and author of Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa

"While postmodernism in architecture has become historical, its history, resonances, and after-effects are not yet over. This insight becomes palpable as Hilton Judin brilliantly contextualizes the rise of postmodernist architecture in South Africa within the decades long struggle against segregation, forced removals, and apartheid in a disintegrating society. Transforming North American models in the urban South African context, postmodern architecture functioned either as nostalgic ornament or anxious defiance, reflecting conflictual social consciences and ideologies. A must read for anyone interested in the deep structures of the post-apartheid present." Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Johannesburg-based architect Hilton Judin is Adjunct Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits University. He is a curator and co-editor of the exhibition and book blank ____ Architecture, apartheid and after; author of Architecture, State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital; editor of Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins, and co-editor of In Whose Place? Confronting Vestiges of Colonialism and Apartheid.