Rethinking architecture: the body and soul of a real home

Far too many homes, especially in cities and overcrowded townships, are soulless and deprived of emotion, of everything that makes us human. They were designed for spreadsheets, not to harbour their inhabitants' stories

- By Wandile Mthiyane

When you walk into a funeral home and see an open casket, something feels off. The body is there and yet the person you loved is gone.

You don't weep because the body has disappeared. You weep because the soul that animated it has left. What remains is a sacred museum of memory.

Architecture, I've come to realise, is much the same. Buildings are the body. People — their laughter, their dreams, their small daily rituals - are the soul. I didn’t learn this from textbooks. I learnt it through grief.

I grew up in South Africa, moving through 13 townships before I became a teenager. I saw how fragile housing could rob families of stability. My mother prayed constantly that one day we'd have a dignified place to call our own. But just a week before I left on a scholarship to study architecture in Michigan, she died. My father, still fighting to make her dream a reality, died shortly after I graduated.

Grief taught me that the loss of home is not the loss of walls — it’s the loss of the people, the memories, the love that could have unfolded within those walls. In that way, my understanding of architecture began not with presence, but with absence.

Peter Zumthor, the Swiss architect, writes in Thinking Architecture: “When I design a building, I frequently find myself sinking into old, half-forgotten memories... They are the reservoirs of the architectural atmospheres and images that I explore in my work.”