This project provides the first authoritative account of the work of Jo Noero, a seminal South African architect for forty years throughout the tumultuous political change in the country over that period. It sheds new light on issues of racial discrimination, inequity, and spatial segregation by looking not at North America or Europe but at a nation undergoing liberation from an explicitly racist regime—South Africa. Since Bishop Desmond Tutu, a key leader of the liberation movement alongside Nelson Mandela, appointed him as architect to the Johannesburg diocese, Noero developed an inventive architectural language commensurate with tight budgets and limited construction skills on projects which provide otherwise unavailable social services and symbolize hope, in line with Tutu’s initial wishes. He continues to expand this language across cultural, social, and residential projects to the urban scale, always remaining clear that architecture works alongside rather than substitutes for political action.

Jeremy Melvin is a writer, curator and academic specializing in modern and contemporary architecture. Curator for the World Architecture Festival (WAF) since it launched in 2008, he was consultant curator for architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) 2000–14, where he convened the Royal Academy Forum and curated the exhibition Richard Rogers Inside Out (2013). He has a particular interest in the relationship between architecture, aesthetic theory, politics and culture, reflected both in the WAF and RA programs. He has written ...Isms: Understanding Architecture, (A&C Black, 2005) and FRS Yorke and the Evolution of English Modernism (Wiley, 2003), publications in the Journal of Architecture, the Journal of the Twentieth Century Society, and ARQ, and numerous articles in the professional and British national press (e.g. Architectural Review and The Sunday Times). He graduated BSc in architecture and MSc in architectural history from The Bartlett, University College London, where he was a visiting professor from 2017 through 2022.