CHOROMANSKI
Architecture in Durban

The experience of international joint ventures has been valuable in developing a creative team skilled in innovative and dynamic design, equipped to ensure efficient production as well as high standards of graphic presentation, resulting in numerous successful architectural competitions and awards for completed projects. We strive to acquire contextual knowledge and instill progressive management in each project, whilst valuing creative technological approaches. Urban designer and advisory design consultant to the KwaMashu Town Re-development. We have taken this process of development and turned it into innovation. Music, sculpture, performance intertwined with community, social and economic. For us, design is a full circle of development and collective influences. Heritage for heritage sake often results in static environments that serve the name rather than the people of a city. Heritage for people’s sake has much more dynamic and profound results. However, unlike many other heritage buildings it has formed and been formed by the communities around it, posing possibilities for re-imagining public buildings. Its destruction raises questions about who is building our city and what space making in. In 1995 Leonie Hall and Rodney Choromanski, a young artist and architect respectively, restored the building and founded the arts centre called Studio It operated for two and a half years asserting art’s ability to empower citizens. Its placement at the beginning of new democratic era linked the studio to projects like the BAT Center in its vision for bridging gaps and celebrating cultural diversity.The project attracted large media coverage, assisting over one thousand students from all ages and cultures within the area and surrounding communities. Its heritage value, position along a main road and quaint aesthetic made it the perfect spot for demonstrating how buildings with public identities can enrich communities. Once the arts centre closed down, the Swiss Stone Mason once again took over the building, preserving the heritage and using it for the display and sale of tomb stones. Instead of destruction, incorporating the tin temple in the form of a public entrance, gallery or workshop could have not only retained social and heritage value, but also presented possibilities of how a business and the community it is in could interact and be mutually enriching. We cannot afford to lose these places of possibility to insensitive practice at this time in our country’s history. For architecture to reflect people rather than capital we need to explore innovative ways of making public spaces, commercial viability and heritage work together. Choromanski says Manteca is more than a band, it is a project that regards the audience as being part of the group.