In 1970 I was offered a job with Lorenz and Pearce, a small architectural practice, based in Lusaka, Zambia. The partners were Erhard Lorenz, a Dane and Mick Pearce, a white Rhodesian. Erhard had previously been practicing in Salisbury (now Harare) in what was then Southern Rhodesia but had become disillusioned with what was going on there politically and had moved north to Lusaka just before Zambia became independent. Mick, who was very sympathetic to the aims of the independence movements in Southern Rhodesia, could not move back there because of his links to these movements and had joined Erhard’s practice in Lusaka.
I decided to write this piece because few people outside of Zambia (even in Denmark) know of Erhard or his work and I think that he deserves to be better known.
Erhard was born in Copenhagen in 1913 into a well-educated, middle-class family (he once told me that his father was the harbourmaster in St Petersburg under the last Czar) with links to the worlds of art and music. Through these links he met many of those who later influenced his choice of career such as the architect Mogens Lassen and the engineers Jorgen Varmning and Ove Arup.
Upon leaving secondary school in 1932, Erhard was accepted at the Academy of Fine Art’s School of Building but after a year or so he spent more and more time with Mogens Lassen who became his mentor, tutor and friend. He spent a summer as a bricklayer apprentice (in Zambia he was still proud of his brick-laying skills and would often give Zambian bricklayers tips on bricklaying) and gained more practical experience with a Belgian building contractor and then as site supervisor on a hotel project.
He returned to Denmark to work with Lassen and together they entered a series of large design competitions many of which won awards. He then moved to Finland where he spent eight months working for Alvar Aalto. He returned to Denmark and submitted a proposal for the design competition for the new town hall in Søllerød which won third prize. The winning entry was by his friends Arne Jacobsen and Flemming Lassen who asked him to be the site supervisor for the construction of the project.
In 1943 he married Bente Hinrichsen¹ (an artist and ceramicist) and continued working mainly on one-family houses in Denmark in which he skilfully dealt with the wartime shortages of materials and money. After the war he decided to travel and two of his friends, Jorgen Varming and Ove Arup, introduced him to the Irish architect, Michael Scott, who was about to start a large project for the Irish government and who hired him. During his three years in Ireland, he won another competition in Denmark (subject not known and presumably, as he did not go back to Denmark at this time, the project was not built) and was awarded the Danish Royal Academy’s gold medal.
By 1946 however, the amount of work in Scott’s office had begun to diminish and Erhard accepted an offer to work in the then Southern Rhodesia for an architect called Donald McGillivray and he and Bente moved to Bulawayo. After three years, Erhard wanted to set up his own practice in the country but in order to do this, he had to become a member of the RIBA and pass their final exams. He and Bente therefore moved to London for two years so that Erhard could study and pass the exams which he did in 1955. Erhard’s friend Ove Arup had also moved to London at this time and had set up his engineering practice and while he was in London, Erhard designed a new house for Arup in Highgate, London. However, when Erhard moved back to Rhodesia, Arup made changes to the design.
On his return to Southern Rhodesia, Erhard set up a one-man practice in Salisbury and Bente established a ceramic studio. They remained in Salisbury for eight years during which time they made many friends, both black and white with Erhard doing a variety of jobs, some in association with other local architects.
Southern Rhodesia was at that time part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland but the black population’s demands for independence were increasing, a move that the minority white population was determined to resist. In 1963 the reactionary Rhodesian Front won the election and started to move to independence under white rule. At the end of 1963, having seen which way the wind was blowing, the Lorenz family decided to move north to Northern Rhodesia (which would gain independence in 1964 as Zambia) and they made the move at the beginning of 1964.
The family² settled in Lusaka, the capital of the new country, and Erhard soon began getting commissions. In 1965 he started designing a house for a site that he had obtained in Longacres, not far from the centre of the city.
The compound contained living quarters for the family (with very nice features such as private, outside showers), offices for Erhard and his staff, a ceramic studio for Bente, staff quarters and a courtyard for sculptors to work in³), all surrounded by a high wall which gave security and privacy in the heart of the city. As can be seen, the building code allowed for construction right up to the site boundary so no space was wasted. All of the buildings were single storey, constructed of rendered and painted brickwork with exposed hardwood roof beams and hardwood windows and they all were very comfortable to live and work in with natural ventilation and no air-conditioning. The ceramic studio was open on the courtyard side and you could see the potters at work.
At the time of Zambian independence, the Lorenzs were probably the only Danes living in Lusaka and Erhard became the Danish Consul which, although he joked about it, did give him access to the government and to the President. The house became a centre for artists of all sorts living in the country and for the Lorenz’s many friends from around southern Africa and notable visitors included Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Naomi Mitchison, Frank Norman and many others.
When I joined the office in 1970, the war in Vietnam was at its peak and the price of copper, the bedrock of the Zambian economy at the time, was as a consequence very high and the economy was booming. The result of this was that the office had a lot of work for both government and private clients and a number of young architects had joined the practice, many from the Architectural Association in London (where Mick Pearce had been a student) and some from Denmark. The work of the office during the time that I was there included student accommodation, the University Village (accommodation for visitors and PHD students), a new Administration Building (not built) and the Commonwealth African Regional Centre (now the School of Business Studies) all on or near the University of Zambia campus; housing projects including private houses, housing developments and apartment buildings; three rural secondary boarding schools; several vocational training colleges; office buildings; rural lodges for the President and his wife and other government buildings such as a building for the Ministry of the Internal Affairs.
Some examples of the work that I did in the office can be seen in the ‘Projects’ section of this website under ‘Zambia’. Two projects that Erhard was responsible for after I left the office in 1976 are shown below.
In 1983, he invited his old friend Michael Scott to collaborate with him on the design of a School of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Zambia of which, for funding reasons, only the School of Agricultural Science was built.
In 1985, Erhard was responsible for the design of another building at the University of Zambia, the University Christian Centre shown below.
Erhard’s architectural roots were in the modern movement as it developed before the second world war but his work in Africa reflects his search for simple, economical and appropriate solutions to the problems of building in the tropics using, as far as possible, local materials and building techniques. Many of the buildings mentioned above were not designed by him but by members of the office but they all follow his basic philosophy.
I joined the office from UK with no previous experience of working in Africa or the tropics (and with little practical experience) and I had to learn a lot very quickly about the design and construction of low-cost, appropriate buildings in developing countries taking into account the local climate, local building techniques and materials, etc. Fortunately, I found in Erhard the mentor that I needed and I will always be grateful to him. The practical experience that I gained and the lessons that I learned have stood me in good stead for the rest of my career and have proved very relevant to my work on buildings and projects in a variety of tropical and other developing countries.
If Erhard had remained in Denmark, his status as a gold medal winner would no doubt have earned him many commissions and he would now be remembered as one of the country’s most significant architects. He was instead happy to pursue his career in relative obscurity in Zambia devoting himself to the work that he enjoyed best.
There is, unfortunately, very little information available anywhere about Erhard and his work and much of this material is based on an article written by his friend, the late Poul Kjӕrgaard and published in ‘Arkitektur DK 1/1989’. Erhard died of cancer in 1994.
The photo gallery below includes photos of the Lorenz compound taken at various dates. Most of the black and white photos date from the early 1970s and some were taken from the article mentioned above and some were sent to me by Martin Lorenz. The colour photos were taken by my friend Jorgen Eskimose (who also worked for Erhard in the 1970s) in 2011 when he visited Bente shortly before she died.
¹ Bente Lorenz (née Hinrichsen) was born in Denmark in 1922. She studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Copenhagen and before she married Erhard, worked in Copenhagen and London in graphics, textiles and ceramics. Erhard built her a covered, open-air ceramics studio within the compound in Lusaka where she worked with her assistants. She did a lot of research on glazes using materials that she sourced from all over Zambia and made some beautiful ceramics of all kinds. She also worked with Zambian women making traditional pots (or modern items based upon traditional themes) which were then glazed and fired in the studio. She was one of the founders of the Lechwe Trust, a charitable trust set up to support the visual arts in Zambia and she died in Lusaka in 2011.
² The Lorenzs had three children, a daughter who was a flautist and who married a Japanese architect and lived in Japan; another daughter who trained as an architect and who took over Erhard’s practice after he died (and who sadly passed away recently) and a son who still lives in Lusaka.
³ Tubayi Dube, who worked for the Lorenzs as a cook in Salisbury, went with them to Lusaka and there, encouraged by the Lorenzs, found his true vocation as a sculptor. He had a great natural talent and produced some brilliant pieces of work out of timber and stone. I bought several pieces from him including a larger than life-size head in stone which unfortunately I left in Lusaka when I left the country. He sold many of his carvings and when the Lorenzs’ gardener, Masiye Miti, saw that money could be made out of carving, he also started working in wood and stone (although he had had no formal training, he too proved to have a natural talent) and I bought some of his first pieces, a wonderful elephant carved out of stone and a large, wooden tortoise, both again left behind in Lusaka. The official ‘Danish Consulate’ sign that hung outside the office up until 1972 ended up, when Erhard was no longer Consul, outside Masiye’s very small house in one of the unofficial settlements outside the city, much to Erhard’s amusement. The Lechwe Trust Art Gallery now has a few pieces of both Tubayi’s and Masiye’s work.
Architecture in Developing Countries: A Resource
The design and construction of appropriate, low-cost buildings for education and health in rural areas of the developing world.
Nigel Wakeham is an architect who lived for 23 years in Southern and West Africa and the SW Pacific working on education, health and other projects. He has since worked for over 20 years as a consultant for national governments and agencies such as the World Bank, DFID, ADB and AfDB on the implementation of the construction components of education and health projects in many countries in the developing world.
The objective of this website will be to provide the benefit of more than 45 years of experience of working in developing countries to architects and other construction professionals involved in the design and construction of appropriate, low-cost buildings for education and health. It will provide reference material from the projects that Nigel has worked on and technical information on the design, construction and maintenance of educational and health facilities and other relevant topics and these will be added to from time to time.
I am happy to be contacted by anyone requiring further information on any of the projects or resources referred to in this website or by anyone wishing to discuss work possibilities.
コメント