The ideal homes competitions of the 1930’s. Architectural setting for a South African white middle-class

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates the Rand Daily Mail Ideal Homes Competition (1934) and the Argus Ideal Homes Competition (1937) as representations of white South African middle-class culture in the 1930’s. Drawing on Amos Rapoport’s use of ‘setting’, it explores how this group’s cultural values and beliefs where encultured in these competitions. It tells the story of a recently regulated architectural profession’s attempt to, with architects at the same time competing with one another and working together, promote their skills and values to the public. The limiting of this ‘public’ to a white middle-class is related to broader cultural, social and spatial orders of a racially segregated South African society. The article shows how norms of good domesticity, ideal family and civil society found a setting in the ideals of the competitions and the white middle-class cultural order.