Cape Town, 17 January 2008 - After successful showings in Berlin, Germany, Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Johannesburg and Durban, the works of winner Heinrich Wolff and fellow nominees of the 2007 DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Architecture will soon be on show in Cape Town.

The exhibition will run from Sunday, 27 January 2008 to 30 March 2008 at the National Gallery.

Heinrich Wolff of Cape Town-based architectural firm, Noero Wolff Architects, won the 2007 DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Architecture last year.

The DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Architecture is the seventh Arts Award bestowed by DaimlerChrysler. The company has, since 2000, sponsored different art disciplines and recognised artists within the fields of contemporary art (Kay Hassan), jazz (Themba Mkhize), sculpture (Jane Alexander), choreography (Sbo Ndaba), creative photography (Guy Tillim) and poetry (Gabeba Baderoon).

The award offers support to talented and innovative artists from South Africa and helps raise the profile of these artists at national and international level with winners invited to present their bodies of work overseas.

“I grew up on the privileged side of an unfair society and I feel compelled to contribute in effort and in ideas to the physical and intellectual reconstruction of the country,” says Heinrich Wolff. “For me this means purposefully engaging in projects that go across boundaries of race, income group, received or constructed culture or historical categories. It would be unsatisfactory to think that great architectural opportunity would lie only with wealthy clients or international commissions where South African social-economic realities do not exist.”

He adds, “All too often, architecture produced in South Africa desperately subscribes to international expressions without sharing the context that brings that work into being. It is one thing to participate in international debate; it is a different thing to deny your own reality. If architectural ideas do not have equal currency for the poor like it has for the rich, then those ideas lack substance in our context.”

The exhibition returns to Germany for a final showing at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, from 25 April 2008 to 31 August 2008.

A monographic catalogue devoted to Heinrich Wolff and a separate publication featuring the eight nominees – Wolff, Archilab, Heather Dodd, Andy Horn, Ndabo Langa, Henning Rassmuss and Chris Wilkinson, accompany the exhibitions.

About Heinrich Wolff

Heinrich Wolff (37) became a partner in Noero Wolff architects in 1998. Over the past nine years he has been involved in teaching design, construction and theory at various universities, and focuses on the themes of Third World architecture, material culture, architecture and landscape, and multiple outcomes. His architectural work includes residential, commercial, low-cost housing, educational and health facilities.

For more information, contact Marilyn Martin, Tel. 021 467 4660 or email mmartin@iziko.org.za.

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