“The full recovery of the rescued collection will be a long road ahead; potentially taking years”, says Prof Noëleen Murray.

On Sunday, 18 April, much of the Jagger Reading Room in the library at the University of Cape Town (UCT) was tragically destroyed by a runaway bush fire. While the Special Collections housed in the basements were protected from the flames by the building’s fire door mechanism, these areas were flooded in the process of extinguishing the fire, and so an intense two-week long rescue operation has been underway to try and save these irreplaceable items.

UP Vice-Chancellor and Principal Professor Tawana Kupe made a public announcement of the university’s willingness to assist UCT. Following this, the Library Archivists at UCT sought out the expertise of Professor Noëleen Murray, Research Chair in Critical Architecture and Urbanism at UP (Department of Archaeology and Anthropology in the Humanities Faculty).  The focus is on salvaging the Uytenbogaardt archive, followed by the broader architectural collections stored in the Jagger Library vault.

Handle with extreme care

“The collections contain large, oversized drawings on various materials, and are extremely difficult to handle,” said Prof Murray, who was based in Cape Town over the COVID-19 crisis and available to help on site.

“Wet drawings had to be transferred to flat surfaces without being damaged so that the volunteer conservators could assess them, and then unrolled and dried.” This was a task requiring a team of archivists, retired librarians and volunteer architects and planners. “The work required space and drawings had to be carefully transported. Once unrolled or lifted from flooded plans drawers, they have been dried in rooms with dehumidifiers and set in between sheets of blotting paper.”

Prof Murray added that many of the rest of the papers, including photographs, correspondence, job files and the like, are still to be rescued and remain at risk from water and now mould. “The full recovery of the rescued collection will be a long road ahead; potentially taking years. They will require specialist conservation attention and ideally digitisation, as well as the assessment of value and content for collections management.”

Deep connection with the collection

Having studied and worked at UCT as an academic in both the School of Architecture and Planning and in the Centre for African Studies, Prof Murray’s link to the architectural collection contained in the Manuscripts and Archives section at UCT Libraries runs deep.

In 1998 she started the Modern Architecture Documentation Project, a research collection which was largely housed in Special Collections. This led to her holding the first ever PhD in African Studies, utilising Roelof S Uytenbogaardt papers as an inquiry into in-depth architectural research.

She has subsequently continued her work in this field, pioneering a humanities approach to critical architecture and urbanism that locates modern architecture in relation to apartheid in South Africa. Part of this continued work has been a long-standing collaboration with photographer Svea Josephy, Associate Professor and Head of Photography at Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT. Professor Josephy joined the volunteer team who have been working tirelessly in this race against time. 

Praise for UP

Despite the challenging circumstances, Prof Murray said a highlight that stood out for her from the rescue effort has been meeting Jabulile Ntuli, a UP Tangible Heritage Conservation master’s student assisting at UCT. “There has been such huge praise for the UP team, I was extremely proud of our university.”

While securing the archives of architectural papers is the priority, Prof Murray said there is also a risk to a number of research projects located in the Chair, with access being jeopardised once these collections go into long-term storage.

“Two monograph projects depend on these collections, as does an envisaged international lecture and an architectural exhibition already in the planning stages.”

She added that the fire may also highlight the national need for conservation of these collections, and that UP is well placed to develop a national interest point in the longer term.

Prof Murray envisages assistance through her Research Chair in Critical Architecture and Urbanism, as well as the architectural archives at UP, which are some of the best in the country. This could potentially take the form of a collaborative effort, with UP working alongside UCT Libraries, supporting their efforts and aiding conservation of this key collection of South African architectural heritage.

“Perhaps, as UCT Vice-Chancellor Mamokgethi Phakeng says, the fire presents an opportunity for reconceptualisation and rebirth through recovery,” Prof Murray concluded.