Home Upfront Now Up Books Towns Structures People Firms Lexicon		Honouring Gus Gerneke as Writer _____________________________________________________ Author: FISHER, RC In: Architecture S A : Journal of the South African Institute of Architects (Nov/Dec) Date: 2013 Pages: pp 51-52 _____________________________________________________
GUS HAS WRITTEN almost exclusively in English. Hardly a matter of choice, I suspect, but a stricture of circumstance, something to be endured. But having chosen to use English as medium, his use of the language is choice. I quote, by way of example, a telling sentence from his essay From Brazil to Pretoria in The Architecture of the Transvaal (1998): ‘the modern clique had their claque.’ that is as economical a sentence as one can construct with a depth of meaning. Firstly, note his use of the word ‘modern’, not ‘modernist’ – the latter is, for Gus, meant as a snide dismissal of an attempt at being modern. Then, how often in the English language have you encountered that word ‘claque’? Having barely established the authenticity of the Moderns by being particular about their name, he introduces a dismissive word, ‘claque’, a hired, or in this sense kowtowing, clique, implying acolytes. Of course, for those of you who know Gus, his choice of both words are for those that have migrated into the English language from French, and oddly both have their origins in the making of sound, ‘clique’, to make a noise, and ‘claque’ to clap. Perhaps it should not surprise us that Gus looks to words that find their meaning in the metaphorical world of sound, for I am told that he was a gifted musician, both as violinist and pianist, and distracted himself from architectural studies by frequently switching back to music, hence postponing his graduation in architecture by some 20 years, a record for the Pretoria school of architecture that still stands! (anecdotally, I should add that he has told me that in the world of classical music, there are only two operas, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavelier.) When writing, Gus claims one cannot but start elsewhere than in Mesopotamia. in his essays The Return to Earth (published in parts in SA Architect in the 1990s) he does just that, and unearths many salient and anecdotal facts. Some pertinent, many, as is his wont, irrelevant if not irreverent! My suspicion is that Gus’s love of mud harks back to his days as a child of the Western Transvaal (now the North West), with its heat and dust. He relates how, in his day, they had to grow vegetable gardens and that there were prizes at the local agricultural shows for school children with the largest display of cabbages, pumpkins, beans and the like. Sustainability, he says, was not fashionable, but an imperative. A third theme in Gus’s writing is the preoccupation with creativity and the creative endeavour. I suppose that as a teacher, this is inevitable. I know how it struck me, that in order to teach in the design studio, you had to get into the head of the designer you were engaging with, and that each was different. Gus’s particular genius was for finding and directing the spark of genius in those he taught. His essay Reculer pour Mieux Sauter is a musing on what this might be. The phrase, which means to retreat in order to leap forward, gained currency in English from the writings on creativity by Arthur Koestler in his book The Act of Creation. Gus wrote then like the mathematician Henri Poincaré that: ‘Invention requires incubation, preceded by a preparation of hard, conscious and systematic work. after long periods where no … work was done, illumination came suddenly and unexpectedly, but with immediate certainty. Then followed a period of verification, demanding discipline, diligence, will and thus consciousness.’ COPY, MODEL, IMITATION, FAKE Another of Gus’s fixations, and a theme on which he has written, is the idea of the simulacra. Was it a copy, model, imitation or fake? I recall him debating endlessly in the studio whether the Kaya Rosa, the original late-Victorian home of the Jewish journalist Leo Weinthal, where the University of Pretoria had its origins, relocated in parts to the central campus in the 1980s, was a fake or a copy. it could not be an anastylosis – for the sense of this, we needed to raid obscure dictionaries to elicit meaning, since only dry assembled architecture disassembled and reassembled could aspire to be an anastylosis. So what was the reconstructed Barcelona Pavilion? It could not be a copy since the only record was black-and-white photographs, so how could we trust the matched pair of flamed marble panels? Was it a model? Was it a fake? JOTS AND TITTLES Gus is enamoured of proper punctuation. From him I learnt the sanctity of the em dash. Not for him a mere hyphen. But God help the editor who got it wrong. Not for him cat, shoots and leaves. No! He will fulminate, spew invectives and then – alas, alack, poor editor – write a letter. This is the unpublished oeuvre of Gus’s writing and what I would give to have a collection of these. The em dash became an idée fixe and a cause célèbre (you see Gus, after all these years I’ve learnt some French). And the wrath would only subside after Gus had once more been persuaded to again write and had another set of typographical errors to fight. So if you wonder why there is so little of Gus in print, blame the editors; if not, then the typographers. STYLE For Gus, tautology is anathema, verbosity vulgar, unrelated participles and split infinitives uncultured, imprecision impertinent and bad punctuation uneducated. A good colleague of mine once said that whenever preparing a lecture, he had a single student in mind, which brought life to the task and turned it into a labour of love. I must admit that when I write, it is as if to be read by Gus. So I mind my p’s and q’s, worry about the jots and tittles, hunt down the dangling participles and reunite the split infinitives. For I know that is what he would do.