Jo Noero is a South African architect who has practised in Johannesburg, in Port Elizabeth and now in Cape Town, and who has built persistently in townships and informal settlements — schools, churches, clinics, community halls — across four decades. His most discussed building is the Red Location Museum in New Brighton, designed with Heinrich Wolff as Noero Wolff Architects and opened in 2006: twelve rusted steel memory boxes standing inside a shed, their form borrowed from the trunks in which migrant workers kept what they owned, arranged so that no route through the exhibition is prescribed. It won the RIBA Lubetkin Prize in 2010. It has been closed since October 2013, when residents of Red Location shut the museum in protest at the condition of their houses, and it has not reopened.
