Architectural Guide South Africa
Architectural Guide South Africa Roger C Fisher ∕ Nicholas J Clarke Edited by Ingrid Stegmann Foreword by Volkwin Marg Contributions by Ilze Wolff, Nina Saunders, Mo Phala, and Melinda Silverman
Contents Introduction Foreword Volkwin Marg .................................................................................................................................................... An architectural guide to three South African metros ............................................................. A brief guide to the metropoles Roger C Fisher ∕ Nicholas J Clarke .........................
Cape Town
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My Cape Town Ilze Wolff ..................................................................................................................................................... 18 Cape Town Map .............................................................................................................................................................................. 20
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Durban
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My Durban Nina Saunders ................................................................................................................................................ 50 Durban Map ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 52
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Appendix Addresses ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 158 Index........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 166 Authors..................................................................................................................................................................................................... 175
Pretoria
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My Pretoria Mo Phala ............................................................................................................................................................ 86 Pretoria Map ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 88
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Johannesburg
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My Johannesburg Melinda Silverman ................................................................................................................. 116 Johannesburg Map ................................................................................................................................................................... 120
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Foreword Volkwin Marg ∕ gmp Architekten
What first drew me to South Africa as a tourist was Nature, the animal world, the country and its people. Later on, as a practising architect, it was the competition for the World Cup 2010 stadiums in Cape Town, Port Elisabeth and Durban. What a contrast of natural landscapes and metropolitan regions! If you’ve already worked as an architect on many continents and in different countries, what you don't expect is this surfeit of archetypal native roots and historic building culture on the one hand, and cutting edge high-tech architecture on the other, let alone having them right next to one another and sometimes even relating socially to one another.
We with our Berlin team designed and built all three stadiums as 50 ∕ 50 joint ventures with South African teams who were 'black empowered‘ for political reasons. What we had to do was to leave all the ignorance and arrogance of dubious global media commentators behind by showing together through what we built that not only could we meet tight deadlines, but also use the latest line and membrane construction systems. What inspired us most was how enthusiastic the South Africans were about the architectural challenges involved in finding the genius loci for each of the three cities and responding to it architecturally.
In the case of Cape Town, the venue was the political demonstration, the tradition-rich 'common green‘ and golf course and ex-rugby stadium in the centre of the white quarter to create a stadium as a balanced aesthetic triad with the topography of flat-topped Table Mountain and the peak of Signal Hill. The blacks were to play soccer and the whites rugby in the same stadium and share it peacefully so to speak. In Durban, the architectural challenge was a building programme right from the start: “We are a rainbow City, black, white and coloured,- put us on the map.” The white City Council had been an anti-apartheid protagonist for the ANC for
decades, and with its coloured delegates, promised they wouldn’t let corruption stand a chance. And they didn't either. They thought well ahead, for the future of South Africa, and also wanted the stadium to be suitable for applying to host the Commonwealth and Olympic Games too. They got what they wanted, borne by a rainbow, wide open, with a view of Durban ∕ downtown. Out of sheer enthusiasm, they added a cable car to the contract later to give all their citizens the chance to travel up to the 100 m high zenith of the rainbow and look over their growing city. They are looking forward eagerly to the future.
Roof of Cape Town Stadium and city skyline.
8
An architectural guide to three South African metros Cape Town, Durban and the Johannesburg ∕ Pretoria Axis
This guide is a celebration of the works of professional architects in three South African metropolitan centres, namely Cape Town, Durban and the Johannesburg ∕ Pretoria Axis. The content ranges from the early years of European settlement, when architects were trained by the military schools of engineering through a period of apprenticeship either to a recognised practising architect or in public works, to the C20 and beyond, when architects were regulated as professionals by legislation, as was their education. The projects selected
are all secular, being in the public domain or eye, and therefore readily accessible. The guide is structured along main themes, each historically located. Each featured episode or project type is exemplified by a representative from each metropolitan centre, each of which is discussed in broader detail alongside similar contemporaneous local examples. In total the guide features over 150 projects complete with salient information on their dates of construction, designers and locality (using QR codes).
http://goo.gl/i8udoi
Northern province Polokwane
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Pretoria North West Klerksdorp
Kimberley
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Nicholas J Clarke ∕ Roger C Fisher
Dear Reader, Be aware, we were asked to present this guide and gladly accepted. We both were taught the history of the South African built environment and her cultural landscape, Clarke also having been taught by Fisher, so there is a tradition here. Whereas most histories of architecture, particularly those of schools of the western tradition, would start in Ancient Greece, some farther back in Mesopotamiaor the fertile crescents of the Levant.In a guide of this nature, that is not possible to do. The reader, if using this guide for purposes of visiting localities in South Africa, will inevitably and inadvertently traverse these ancient terrains, but, invariably, remain oblivious to their significance. In this book, of necessity, we resort to a western tradition of architecture, its discipline as a taught profession in the C19, either through tutelage in the office of a master, or within the academies created for this purpose. So let us begin. Traditions The peoples in the south of Africa each have their own history, and each of these is our heritage. We have our First People, those for whom the land is home; the “transhumants”, those for whom the land is for sustenance and grazing; the early pastoralists, those for whom the land is also to be settled and exploited; the settlers, for whom the land offers opportunity; explorers, who mined territories for new knowledge; and exploiters, for whom the land is a commodity, to pillage and abandon. We are heirs to that complex mix. What we have by way of the built environment is the investment of those who stayed and lived here.
The themes This guide is structured through generalist themes, chosen to resonate not only with the history of architecture in South Africa, but to incorporate the social paradigms that formed the architecture discussed. The seven socio-architectural themes are further extended by seven more typological themes. These present: buildings serving public transport in each city, and airports (for the traveller); the stadia built or renovated for the 2010 FIFA World Cup; the Schools of Architecture that deliver professional architects located in the cities and conference centres, venues many visitors to South Africa will encounter during their sojourn here. The three metropoles presented here – Cape Town, Durban and the Johannesburg ∕ Pretoria Axis – each have their own character directly related to their role in the history and development of South Africa, its peoples, national identity and culture. The Cape is peopled, as are most port cities, by a diversity of cultures with many ancestries. The indigenous KhoeKhoen have been subsumed into the socalled Coloured people, who typify the Cape. As a transhumant herder people, their material culture was scant and their construction traditions similarly ephemeral – karosses, grass matting, poles, with pack oxen as their mode of transport. The Dutch brought with them a slave population from their eastern territories and trade along the African coasts, many of whom were reluctant colonists, their origins lost in anonymity. Yet their traditions persist, particularly in the crafting of the built environment, with carved timber and moulded plaster as their legacy.
Introduction
A brief guide to the metropoles
10 For many their religion was Islam, and as restrictions on worship lifted under British rule, theirs became an important part of the cultural diversity in the Cape. Northern Europeans and soon in the late C17 French Huguenots, gave the Dutch descendants and their buildings a particular character – termed Cape Dutch. The early Dutch legacy The Dutch East India Company grudgingly established themselves in the Cape of Storms (1652), having been upstaged by the Portuguese in more easterly territories they would rather have had for their enterprise of trading with the east. Their permanent fortress, the Castle of Good Hope (1666), by which emponym they had renamed the Cape, was built to defend them from their own seafaring European neighbours with whom, at differing times, they found themselves at war. This, however, soon changed to protecting them against marauding local clans. That set up a tradition of “Frontier”,of “us” and “them”, “the other” – a culture that still resonates into the present. The importance of military engineering is the built consequence of this episode. Military engineers became the first designers of built structure in South Africa and much of the early built residue bears testimony to this. The first architect qualified to the profession in European style was Louis Michel Thibault, of the French Military Academy, qualified in military engineering and architectural design, and significantly, a Free Mason. His oeuvre was of the earliest heritage of the traditions of the profession, and the “triumvirate” formed by him, the German-born sculptor Anton A nreith and his compatriot, builder Herman Schutte, created a legacy in what has come to be termed “Cape Dutch”.
Replica of a VOC peroid coin cast into the doors of the Norman Eaton designed Bank Towers (Nedbank Building, see entry 013C).
Theme 1: Early Architects Cape Town was established 234 years before Johannesburg. In that period, South Africa passed from the Dutch to British, back to the Dutch and back to the British. Style movements came and went. The local vernacular developed its own traditions and religious architecture from Europe and Asia, bestowing cities and towns with foreign architectural landmarks. The Early Architects theme therefore spans more than a century. For each metropolis, buildings designed by professional architects were selected to represent the dominant culture of the early years of that place. Thibault, as an Academy trained architect, brought the Beaux Arts tradition to South African shores, in the current mannered Neo-Classicism of the time. The British, in their final colonialisation of the Cape in 1806, brought Georgian Neo-Palladianism with its accompanying Adam-style fittings, furnishings and decorative elements. Thereafter Britishpreferences for style-revivalism prevailed, and although the Colony was not fertile grounds for a ‘battle of the styles’, the rapid growth of British church communities in the mother city and the ‘platteland’, gave rise to the early Saxon-Gothic styling advocated by the Ecclesiological Society in Britain, while the needs of secular society were served Neo-Classicism and Revivalism. As points of trade exchange, the colonies, particularly the Cape and Natal, supplied raw materials and agricultural produce, receiving in exchange the wares of a rapidly industrialising mother country. So the buildings became places for which such produce was destined – pressed steel ceilings, cast iron structural elements, decorative pieces, and the epitome of the industrial era, corrugated galvanized iron sheeting. The style was the cornucopia of Revivalism – from Egyptian to Classical – and the elements combined in profusion. The British Wherever power and wealth were to be found in the C19, there followed the British.Initially, South Africa had more nuisance than economic value for the
11 The Johannesburg-Pretoria Axis The Boers finally settled in the grasslands of the interior, the so-called Highveld, where two independent farmer republics were established, each rubbing uncomfortable shoulders with the other – the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (ZAR, also termed the Transvaal). The British tolerated their presence as long as they toed the line of international treaties, for instance neither trading in nor keeping slaves. This equanimity was shattered by the discovery of diamonds in the Cape, thereafter gold on the Reef. The British needed no excuse to procure and secure such wealth, and this they did by both stealth, then war. The ZAR, once a bankrupt state dependent on its immigrant Indian traders for bail-out, found itself with an embarrassment of tax riches. So in the 1880s, they set about turning the ZAR into a model independent state with requisite infrastructure and buildings. To this end, they imported professional skill and expertise lacking locally. The C alvinistBoer Republics, in particular the ZAR, were served by professionals imported from the cousin-culture of The Netherlands and the style, although both eclectic and revivalist, was generally somewhat more restrained. Architecture as a profession was firmly established through its recognition as a category of employment in the newly created departments of public works. In the Cape, this transpired through gaining home rule, and in the republics, through the developing civil demands on infrastructure and requisite facilities. With that came the drive of these professionals, firstly for association, then for formal recognition by the authorities and client bodies. Archi tects sought to establish their professional identity by creating professional associations, the first of which was established in the Cape in 1898. The T ransvaal, rapidly transformed through the Anglo Boer War (1899–1902), was the first to promulgate legislation for the formal recognition of the professional architect. Herbert Baker, new to the shores of southern Africa at the close of the C19, arrived schooled in the Arts-and-Crafts that then held sway in Britain, and initiated a taste for it in southern Africa. The spread of
Introduction
British, but did afford fertile terrain for two British endeavours – the revival of religious piety with its consequent missionary fervour, and the morally driven campaign for the abolition of slavery. At that stage, the only value of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope was its strategic location on the busy trading route to the east – the “Tavern of the Seas” had its multicultural population associated with such ports. The presence of the British unsettled those of Dutch descent, which drove them to pack up and leave, first into the hostile territory of the Zulu in Natal, which gave cause for the British to follow and set up their own settlements and alliances. Durban too, was a port city, but its later establishment brought Colonial settlers into direct contact and conflict with a powerful and established indigenous people – the Zulu. Although the British held military power and sway, the independent-minded and staunchly independence-driven Zulu have always been a force to be reckoned with, and gave Durban a distinct African character. The importation of Indian labourers indentured to work the sugar plantations in the late C19 added to the diverse character of the peoples and their cultures found within the city. Their Hindu religion and temples added to a rich amalgam of built heritage. Indian Muslim traders followed and also coloured the character of the city with their mosques, bazaars, and madrassas. The British in Natal followed a typical Colonial lifestyle, which still persists in the character of the city. However, Durban’s character is also that of a seaside resort with a harbour and seafront, a playground for up-country holiday makers. This too has impinged on its architectural character, bringing a flamboyance and exoticism to the seafront environment. Durban’s topologically constrained hilly environment has made for a far more varied urban texture than the other metropoles, with formal and informal, well-heeled and down-at-heel living cheek by jowl. This is one of the challenges to makers of the built environment there – to service needy communities in a dignified fashion by facilitating the advantages of urban living in a resourceand land-efficient fashion.
12 Cape Town Stadium from above. English culture after the Anglo Boer War spread the Arts-and Crafts traditions, even when in the guise of Neo-Classicism or Revivalism. Baker himself created the most influential of these, the homegrown Cape Dutch R evivalism, fostered under the patronage of Cecil John Rhodes. With the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, Baker’s influence loomed large, both in recommendations for appointments to the new national Department of Public Works, and in his trend- setting Union Buildings project. His specifications for this monumental pile fostered and developed an independent building supply industry in South Africa. Theme 2: United South Africa With the unification of four British colonies into the Union of South Africa in 1910, the question of national identity arose. Architecture built by the state had to portray this newly created union, not only of the four provinces, but of the two dominant peoples: the Boers and the British. The architectural character of government buildings also had to speak to the British character of the Union. The Edwardian Neo-Classicism, mixed with Arts-and-Crafts Cape Dutch Revival for local flavour, were the stylistic preferences, often infused with the simplicity of strict Neo-Georgian proportioning. During this period, PWD, which designed all governmental projects in house, prescribed the architectural tastes for the
Union. After Union, the status quo was maintained in the various provinces, until the promulgation through a private Act of Parliament of the Institute of South African Architects. This Act also laid down the requirements for formal education and training of those who would be architects. Even though Baker left South African shores as soon as the Union Buildings were complete, his spirit dominated the PWD, which became one of the de facto training schools for architects. The Baker style dominated its production, in particular that of Cape Dutch Revival, and the style of the practitioners, jointly known as the Baker School. Independent schools of architecture came into being, the forerunner being the University of the W itwatersrand (Wits) under a leading “Baker Boy”, Geoffrey Pearse in 1922. Although architecture courses were taught elsewhere, including the M ichaelis School of Art in Cape Town, Wits took the lead in the formal training of architects in South Africa. The time was auspicious because a new spirit was abroad, its prophet being the Swiss Frenchman, the pseudonymous Le Corbusier. Known as the Transvaal Group, pioneer students in a pioneer mining camp in a pioneering country appointed themselves his disciples and actively sought him out. Chief amongst them was Rex M artienssen. He built little and died relatively young, but his theoretical bent was influential and helped South Africa become one of the early international centres of the Modern Movement.
13 Introduction Panoramic view of Johannesburg, the city of gold. Themes 3 and 4: Modern Movement and Art Deco Not only do Art Deco and Modern Movement occupy the same chronological time period, both source their aesthetics in part from the machine. Modern Movement was the more purist of the two. Art Deco was more expressive and eclectic, and therefore more appealing to commercial concerns. The Highveld can rightly call itself the home of the Modern Movement in South Africa (see main text). Art Deco presents its various permutations geographically. Johannesburg looked to New York and its Art Deco skyscrapers, and Durban to Jazz-Age Miami. In Pretoria, Art Deco was employed in monumental buildings, precursors to the Nationalism to come. At the same time Edwardian Neo- Classicism too moved with the times: the astute observer will notice bank buildings from the 1930s with Art Deco styled capitals to their giant-order, classical columns. The Modern Movement found its home in the halls of academia where the purity of the art led to heated debate. It only gained full societal acceptance after the election to power of the National Party (NP), which became patron to this style movement in an attempt to present an image of progressive modernity to the world. Cape Town and Durban were traditionally more staid and the architecture, like their citizenry, aligned with the tried and trusted, avoiding the brashness of the experimentations on the Reef. Tastes in Durban,
like many sea-side resorts such as Miami, leaned towards the more exuberant Art Deco. In the heartland of C alvinist conservatism, Pretoria attitudes were very different. Romantic Nationalism found a resonance in the search for an identity that would make them both heirs to and owners of an African pioneer identity. This sentiment found expression in modern idiom, but rather than the purist machine aesthetic, it was tempered to a crafted modernism in regional guise – deriving its expression from sun and shadows, deep low eaves, sun-shy windows and roofed expanses of shaded patios and verandahs, combining living places with outdoor spaces, and celebrating the relaxed informality of countryside hospitality with the formalities of urban life. Theme 5: Regionalism South Africa is a culturally and climatically diverse country; each of the four metropolises in this book has its own architectural traditions. These traditions are most visible where architecture enters the Regionalist mode. Regionalism is a variant within the Modern Movement where the tenets of modernism are tempered by considerations of local material, techniques, traditions and climate. South African Regionalism looked to the vernacular of both its African and European origins to locate architecture within its cultural context. The Regionalist Movement was bolstered by the materials shortages experienced after World War II
14 Pretoria in summer. (1939–1945), forcing architects to experiment with locally available low-tech materials. It was also a direct consequence of the search for a local architectural identity, a search that commenced before the 1910 unification of the country. Yet even as we speak of these things, it must be recalled that while attempting to bridge the divides between the two white nations, each seeking a commonality for identity in the new, the vast black majority were excluded from the expression of the every-day life of the city except, glaringly, through omission. This omission turned to deliberate separation and exclusion when the NP came to power in 1948. English was separated from Afrikaner, Black from White, and skin tone from skin tone – Coloured, Indian. The state machine was run on a grand vision of diversity as a multiplicity of “separate but equal”. This was enforced by creating the cynically named Bantustans – independent states that were in effect vast dormitory states serving as labour pools for the border industries and located in dormitory townships behind buffer zones. These stretches of no-man’s land served to control movement to and from white residential areas. The built environment in South Africa began to reflect the ideals of separation, especially the Verwoerdian ideology of Grand Apartheid, which became entrenched when South Africa became a Republic in 1961 and formally left the Commonwealth of Nations.
Initially the Royal Institute of British Archi tects (RIBA) remained the recognizing authority. However, when South Africa left the Commonwealth with the establishment of a Republic in 1961, the Baker bequest of the Rome Scholarship was withdrawn by RIBA. As Verwoerdian Grand Apartheid became entrenched, so the professional architectural bodies became formally isolated from the international bodies, such as those if RIBA and the International Union of Archi tects (UIA). Individual architects, whose proven bona fides remained unsullied, were, however,still permitted membership and given a voice. The political nadir of the profession came when a motion by a grouping called Architects Against Apartheid, to condemn Apartheid by was put to the vote in a vast gathering of the professionals. A counter-motion that the motion “be not put” was carried, and the matter was closed. The profession was splintered. Leaders immigrated and joined other émigré voices of dissent, such as Alan L ipmann, Rusty Bernstein and at home, Jack Barnett. After the transition to democracy in 1994, the UIA admitted South Africa to its fold in 1999. Themes 6 and 7: Brutalism and Monumental Nationalism Stylistically, South African architecture has either paralleled or followed, and even lagged behind its European progenitors. For instance, although Cape Dutch is a style recognised as truly South African,
1. Name of the building 2. Name of the architect 3. Completion date 4. GPS location via QR code 5. City identification number 6. Building number 7. City
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Absa Centre Colyn and Meiring and Munnik Visser Architects 1970
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Southern Sun Cape Sun Hotel Louis Karol Partners and Architects 1982
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Addresses pages 158–165 Index pages 166–173
Introduction
15 Naspers Centre Themes 8 and 9: Democracy: Hannes van der Merwe Forging the new South Africa 1962 and Civic Projects Cartwright’s Corner After the dawn of democracy South Hannes vanin der Merwe Partners Africa in 1994, the searchand for an appro1968 priate architectural language turned to the Regionalist tradition to find an
How to use this Guide
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Policies have changed, universal franchise and full democracy instated since 1994, but the gashes of past structures still scar the fabric of society, both physically and psychologically. Politics is not necessarily the stuff of architecture, but if architecture is the ideas and ideals of society reflected in built form, what we see of what remains is still a reflection of those past ideologies, although now defunct. The realization of a peaceful transition to full democracy has served architecture well. Much has had to be built to normalise a fractured past, often symbolically, in many ways through planning of infrastructure, and particularly through re-imagining previous offensive associations with the places and edifices of power, protest or despair. That is the current project of those engaged in creating the built environment of the New South Africa.
expression that was inclusive and could incorporate the cultural vibrancy of the Rainbow Nation. Local materials, the incorporation of craft and art, passive systems and the celebration of the craftsman enriched the exuberant civic projects planned to help heal the inequities of past oppressive practices. Government turned its focus towards developing infrastructure in previously neglected areas and architects now aimed – and still aim – to produce architecture in service of all people. Due to the vast distances many citizens need to travel on a daily basis, transport infrastructure has been the focus of much investment of late. Hosting the 2010 FIFA World Cup in 2010 provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to portray the country as vibrant, colourful, and somewhat exotic, yet sophisticated. The search for an appropriate South African identity in a world in which architecture has become a truly international endeavour, continues …
Cape Town
it can also be used as a survivor Baroque styling, and even its use in C19 eclectic style Revivalism is part of this continuing style tradition. South African architects closely followed international trends during the Apartheid years, especially during the period of the cultural boycott when national, provincial and municipal governments all commissioned large-scale complexes. The International Style with its modular steel and glass façades was preferred in the 1960s. The 1970s saw the rise of New Brutalism, its off-shutter concrete and repetitive modular nature often creating inhuman environments. The construction of large projects, such as telecommunication towers, giant monuments, civic centres and new campuses, all formed part of a governmental programme to entrench the status quo and create an appearance of stability and control. Architecture was employed in service of ideology and most architects were happy to oblige.
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Cape Town CAPE OF STORMS
001–005 006–009 010–014 015–019 020–024 025–028 029–032 033–035 036–037 038 039 040 041 042
Early Architects United South Africa Art Deco Modern Movement Regionalism New Brutalism Monumental Nationalism Forging the new South Africa Civic Projects Intermodal Interchanges International Airports Convention Centres Stadia Architecture Schools
17 Cape Town
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My Cape Town Ilze Wolff
The front of the house was in darkness but beyond the dangling lace curtain at the end of the passageway light glared in the sitting room. The floor was covered with bright linoleum decorated with geometrical designs, and there was a low table with a large clay vase containing coloured paper flowers held up in a piece of netting-wire. A big new radiogram stood against one wall and a sideboard displayed a pair of vases and a glasscovered tea tray with pictures of the Royal family behind the glass. The wallpaper was old, but there was still colour in the pattern of cabbage-like flowers and ribbons. A brocaded divan stood against another wall and its armchairs across two corners. Alex la Guma, A walk in the night, 1967 When I read this, I recognize some of the symbols of respectability that La Guma depicts in his detailed description of the room: the linoleum floor, probably covering a pine timber floor, the fake flowers in the ceramic vase precariously propped up by “netting-wire” and the “sideboard” with its glass-covered tea-tray with pictures of the Royal family behind the glass’. My mind migrates to the living room of my maternal grandparents’ home in Market Street, Grassy Park, where items such as these would be the necessary backdrop for
entertaining priests for Sunday afternoon tea. I go, too, into my paternal grandparents’ voorkamer and I recall how Mamma (my grandmother) proudly shows off her large collection of miniature brass objects, or brasso as she calls it, on the low side table near the front door of her council home in Kloofstraat, Cloetesville. But before I am allowed to get entirely lost in nostalgic daydreams about my ancestors and their homes, I continue reading and am awakened with the fictional reality that the room that is being described by La Guma, is that of a working brothel and smokkie1, in what was then District Six. This was the setting, in fact, for a particularly nasty brawl between the fearless madame Miss Gipsy, Willieboy, a run-away murder suspect, and three foreign “seamen”. Three prostitutes from Miss Gipsy’s brothel, including one named Nancy, entertain the foreign seamen and also participate in the violent dispute. The dispute erupts primarily because of the seamen’s visible class prejudice towards Willieboy. I follow the intricacies of the fight, which La Guma describes with intense graphic precision, but the underlying question that I ask myself is: is the space of belonging, upward mobility and social status (perceived respectability) any different
Founded: 1652 Area: 2 445 km2 (City of Cape Town Metropolitan Municipality) Population (2011): 3 740 026 (for the whole Metropolitan area) Cape Town started as a refreshment station founded by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to service trading ships plying the sea route to East. The Company did not initially plan a permanent colonial settlement, but in 1658, Company officers were quickly granted farmland to meet the needs of the provisioning station. Cape Town, the main settlement of the Cape of Good Hope, was under VOC control until the Second British occupation in 1806. The Cape Colony remained British until it entered the Union of South Africa with Cape Town as the Legislative C apital. Parliament still resides in this, the Mother City. Table Mountain, part of the Cape F loristicRegion World Heritage Site, was named one of the seven Natural Wonders of the World in 2011.
19 I think about my city again, the space of belonging and the space of a haunted past and a haunted present, and I begin to realize that it is perhaps not space alone that transmutes and even subverts meanings. It is the combination of space and time that allows us to perceive particular moments of simultaneity. And perhaps, for me, these moments of simultaneity are really at the intersection between light and dark; in essence a wispy “dangling lace curtain”, it is penetrable and fragile, susceptible to the slightest Cape spring breeze blowing, lifting the curtain, and allowing light to mingle with darkness, and darkness to mingle with light. In the space and time where respectability and immorality are allowed to entangle, what is offered is a horizontal plane in which people, like the complex characters in La Guma’s novel, Adonis, Miss Gipsy, Michael Willieboy and Nancy, are judged by each other on their own terms instead of from above. This in turn overturns the mythical hierarchical axis of morality, set up by a higher moral voice, a voice that says that the higher you reach, the closer you are to God – or the state. The description of space and time that foregrounds simultaneity, allows for the sun to rise from this moral horizon, which in turn enables an empathetic reading of the lives of others. It allows for multiple beings and multiple Cape Towns. 1
A Term that I grew up with for an illegal tavern, short for smokkelhuis, loosely translated into English – smuggle house – a term in direct opposition of a ‘respectable’ home of upstanding citizens.
Panoramic view of Cape Town also known as the Mother City.
My Cape Town
to the space of violence, exploitation and prejudice (perceived immorality)? Cape Town, the place of my birth and the place where I am now raising two children, is a hydra-headed narrative landscape. It is the place to which I belong, to which I return and from which I draw for my creative and intellectual work. But it is also the place that evokes in me a melancholia that I fear is the root of my attachment to the place. With deep histories of C olonialism, slavery and racial segregation, contemporary Cape Town has re-styled itself as a FIFA World Cup Host City, a World Design Capital and a NY Times’ most desired city. It simultaneously stands apart from its legacy of host city to an unjust historical past, while also trying to play host to new global aspirational desires. It is a place where I can buy hand-selected and cured meat from a man called Frankie Fenner, whom I will never meet as I only interact with the two shop assistants, who also serve coffee. It is a place where I can buy Fish from Africa from an unassuming outlet in Woodstock, a place where a handful of fishmongers serve ad-hoc passers-by like me with the same familiarity as their regular weekly customers. Cape Town is a place where the word artisanal is more likely to be associated with craft beer than with the elaborate decorative gables on Cape Georgian homesteads, the work of trans-Atlantic slaves and their descendants. It is a place, not unlike Rio de Janiero or Buenos Aires, where the magnificent natural beauty is also the backdrop for the ugliest sides humanity has to offer.
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Cape Town Map 21
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Cape Town 23
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24
Slave Lodge Louis Michel Thibault 1680, 1807–1814, 1926, 1961–1964
001 A
Louis Michel Thibault (1750–1815), a French officer and Freemason in hired military service of the Swiss Guards to the Dutch East India Company (VOC), can be considered the Cape’s, hence South Africa’s, first formally trained architect, being a graduate of the French Royal M ilitary Engineering Academy. His services were valued by each changing power at the Cape, be they Dutch, British, Batavian or finally British again. When in Dutch employ his duties were chiefly to design military defence structures, but during the first British occupation (1795) Thibault was appointed for the repairs to military buildings of the garrison, taking an oath of allegiance to the British Crown and occupying the formal post of Surveyor of Buildings. Under Governor George Yonge, Thibault was put in a supervisory position of new work for Government
House in Cape Town (1800). In the time of the Batavian Republic (1803– 1806), he was appointed to the post of Inspector- General of State Buildings, Civil and Military by the new governor Commissioner- General Jacob de Mist. In 1806, with the Britsh annexation of the Cape, he was re-appointed Inspector of Public Buildings and was permitted to work as a Sworn Surveyor in 1807. In 1811, he was appointed as G overnment Surveyor and was officially responsible for the design and supervision of all civic buildings erected during this period from 1807 up until his death in 1815. He is credited with having had a hand in various works, such as the conversion of the Old Slave Lodge in the Heerengracht into government offices (1807–1814). This building has a history that is as tumultuous as its creators. It entered life as seedy slave quarters for the VOC slaves, including an execution quadrangle. It also served as a haunt for prostitutes. With the arrival of the British and their anti-slavery sentiments it lost its primary
Green Point Lighthouse
Parliament of South Africa
003 A
Henry Sidon Greaves 1879
Cape Town 25
function, so Lord Charles Somerset tasked Thibault with its conversion to a Court of Justice. Thibault took a deliberate jibe at his British overlords by having Anton Anreith (1754–1822), his oft-collaborating sculptor, depict the British coat-ofarms showing the slippage of the festoons out of the pediment with a startled lion and unicorn caught negligently off-guard. Compare this with the more traditional pediment of the recently restored Granary building on the corner of Buitekant and Shortmarket Street. The converted court building was due for demolition with the widening of Adderley Street in the 1920s, but after much agitation by local architects, historians and cultural bodies, only the Adderley Street façade was demolished and rebuilt under the guidance of Glennie (1889–1954), although spacially altered, losing the suberbly conceived entrance portico. Of the early South African trained female architects, Magda Sauer (1890–1983) was later responsible for its conversion into a cultural history museum, and today it serves the New South Africa as the Museum of Slave History for the Cape-based Iziko Museums complex. Its current appearance demonstrates an amalgam of Dutch sensibilities, British taste and Thibault’s French Revolutionary Mannerist roots.
A
South African Museum
004 A
JE Vixseboxse 1893
002 A
Herman Schutte 1820
Centre for the Book Hawke and McKinlay 1909
005 A
26
University of Cape Town JM Solomon and subsequent appointments 1914–1926
006 A
On the establishment of Union, Cape Town already possessed the requisite public buildings to perform its role as the Legislative Capital. What the country needed was a university of stature to fulfill the needs of tertiary education. Alfred Beit had bequeathed a sufficient amount of money to the then Transvaal Colony for the express purpose of establishing a university there. However, with unification it was thought that Cape Town was a more suitable learning environment because it was considered to be the seat of “established culture”, something thought to be lacking in the Transvaal. The Union Parliament ceded the funds for this purpose in 1916. Lady Florence Philips, through the offices of her acquiescent husband, Sir Lionel Philips, manoeuvred the young restoration architect of their country home in Somerset West, Vergelegen, Joseph Solomon (1886–1920) to be chosen as architect, somewhat to the surprise of the establishment. The job was, however, to cause his demise. The stress of it caused his suicide early one morning after breakfast. Solomon, although being a Baker boy, and indeed the first recipient and beneficiary of the B Baker Scholar ship (1911), had met Lutyens in London
and became a follower, an influence clearly seen in the execution of the project. At the time he had entered partnership with M arshall (1879–1955) who also succumbed to the stresses of the job and suffered a nervous collapse, after which he moved to the Rand. Of Solomon’s conception, the pillared and domed central hall did not materialise, although his desire for buildings of classic simplicity symmetrically arranged did. The architects Hawke and McKinlay took over the job assisted by Walgate (1886–1972) in partnership with Elsworth (1891–1971). Prof Snape, then chair of the School of Engineering, was critical of the Solomon plans, which were then sent to Lutyens for scrutiny and comment. The appointed architects revised the Solomon layout and Walgate, as their assistant, felt equal to the task, having arrived fresh from the curved geometries in the layout of New Delhi in India. The twists of fate make for a happy conclusion – the University of Cape Town (UCT) has one of the most spectacular settings in the world for such an institution. It can be seen on its hillside site from afar, and in turn gives distant vistas across the Cape Flats to the Hottentots Holland Mountains beyond, an exercise not only in taming a landscape, but provisioning an architecture that can hold its own in such grand surrounds through the dignity of simplicity in conception and plainness of
Cape Town 27
A
form. While the campus is forever being enlarged, and the spaces ever tight, the general feel and sense of its Lutyenesque inspiration prevail.
Cape Peninsula University of Technology, City Campus JCE Seeliger 1921
007 A
Land and Agricultural Bank of South Africa Brian Mansergh 1938
008 A
South African National Gallery 009 A Department of Public works and Franklin K Kendall 1933
28
Mutual Heights Louw and Louw with Glennie ∕ Louis Karol Partners and Associates 1940
010 A
The contemporary Modern Movement that emerged and developed between the two World Wars, a style readily adapted to the brash pioneering spirit of the Highveld and so easily adopted there, was slower in coming to the Cape, particularly the
city bowl where a more conservative and traditionalist spirit prevailed, and probably still does. The fashionable Art Deco persisted there and some fine examples are extant. The Old Mutual and Federated Building, now Mutual Heights, epitomises the late use of the style idiom. In the 1930s, the client, Old Mutual A ssurance Company, wished to erect the tallest building in Africa. So, on its completion in 1940, it became the tallest occupied building on the African continent.
Namaqua House Roberts and Small 1930
011 A
Cape Town 29
It was exceeded in height by only the Great Pyramids of Egypt. It superseded the silo structure at the harbour, before this the second tallest structure on the African continent, which is now in the process of adaptive reuse as part of the Waterfront complex. The design of this superb example of the style was done by the hand of a home-grown architect, W ynand Louw (1883–1967) who is generally identified as one of the first Afrikaans architects in South Africa, G erard M oerdyk being the other. He set up office in the Sanlam and Santam Building (now an Absa building at the top of Adderley Street below the C ompany Gardens), also of their design. The firm of Louw and Louw was, in its time, popular with architectural students in training. WJ Louw attended the International Congress of Archi tects in Budapest in 1930 and visited America with Glennie (see Slave Lodge entry (001 A)) in 1937 in preparation as co-architects of the Old Mutual Building, Cape Town. The granite used in its construction is from the Paarl area and quarried from a single stone, ensuring its consistency of colour and texture. The building was opened to rapturous acclaim by the local and architectural press. Marble, gold leaf and stainless steel were used. The extensive frieze on the three sides abutting Darling, P arliament and Longmarket Streets, designed by the sculptor Ivan Mitford-Barberton and executed by a team of Italian masons, is a tour de force that depicts the ideological impact of Europe on South African history. The building became redundant with the development of Mutual Park in Pinelands in the 1960s. The local architectural practice, Louis Karol Associates, undertook the conversion of the building in 2004– 2005. Old Mutual retained ownership of the Assembly Room and Banking Hall. The balance of the office space was converted into about 180 sectional title apartments, and the building was renamed “Mutual Heights”, bringing a residential component back to the city centre.
A
Scott’s Building
012 A
W H Grant 1933
Market House W H Grant 1930
013 A
30
Cape Town General Post Office Department of Public Works 1940
014 A
1 Thibault Square
015 A
Revel Fox and Partners 1971 The theme “Modern Movement” is somewhat of a misnomer for the Cape Town City Bowl since stripped and machine-like Modernism was late in coming to the Cape Town city centre. The Foreshore Reclamation Project, which commenced after World War II, was designed and executed by Dutch marine engineers. It literally offered new ground for the architecture of officialdom and commercialism to flourish, and both express themselves through the language of monumentality and the skyscrapers of the international style. In fact, the whole area was a brave new world, devoid of previous history – only the circumstance of its making were historic – which perfectly suited the endeavours of the modernists with their demands for a tabula rasa (or clean slate) and a- historicism. The vast tract of land formed a separate enclave of monumental proportions, separated from the city by the railway lines and a still incomplete series
of fly-over concrete highways that were meant to make for easy circumnavigation of the city to the harbour area and to further distance suburbs, such as Green Point and beyond on the western seaboard. A newly constructed main rail terminal station was located there, opening up the old station site as a “Golden Acre”, a commercially desirable and valuable piece of land developed as such. While the street-grid of the old city necessitated its continuation over the railroads and beneath the highways, the land parcels are far more extensive than the poky and restricted sites of the old city centre. This allowed for the ‘rectification’ of what in the practicalities of Modern Movement was proper orientation, namely due north-south. The BP Centre tower block allowed for the twist of the tower relative to the podium, which oriented to the street grid, and immediately distinguished the project from other competing tower blocks, namely Cartwright’s Corner in the city centre up Adderley Street and the flashy Trust Bank Centre, which had followed the styling of the Seagram Building in the America. In contrast to the effete aesthetic of these steel-and-glass edifices, this takes on the chunky and robust brutalism expressed in the brushed, exposed aggregate of precast-concrete permanent shuttering left in place to form the façade, and the dominant sun-hoods of the tower floors. The twist set a precedent for towers that were to follow, which has neutralised the uniqueness of this innovation to some extent. The ground floor added to the public spaces of the city domain but its somewhat formidable scale makes it one to be hastily traversed rather than lingered over. The complex bears the name of Thibault, the architect we have already met. Until 1993 it remained the tallest building in the city.
31 Cape Town
A
Naspers Centre
016 A
Absa Centre Colyn and Meiring and Munnik Visser Architects 1970
018 A
017 A
Southern Sun Cape Sun Hotel Louis Karol Partners and Architects 1982
019 A
Hannes van der Merwe 1962
Cartwright’s Corner Hannes van der Merwe and Partners 1968