s The Influencers’ Influences
ROBERT SILKE
Ever wondered who inspires our current generation of architects? Cape Town architect Robert Silke cites the buildings of the late LOUIS KAROL as the reason he pursued a career in architecture… and an internship at his practice that ended up lasting 18 years. WORDS ANNETTE KLINGER
your average ’80s white suburban kid in South Africa. “The Great White Lifestyle
of the time was braaiing in the back yard,” he says on Zoom from the office of Robert Silke & Partners in Cape Town’s Wale Street. “I didn’t really come from that kind of a family. My mother, Eris, was this glamorous
futuristic underground world. There was no sun, only neon lights. It was like Starship’s We Built This City.” Designed by the late Louis Karol and completed in 1979, the Golden Acre represents to Robert one of the first architectural projects of the era that aimed to reconnect a city that had been fundamentally fractured
artist. She never learnt to drive – so she used to pick me
by the forced removals and segregated town planning of apartheid. “By the 1970s, the centre of town was a brutal
up from school in Newlands, and then we would get on a bus and head into town. Nobody else’s mother did that at the time.” Once at the Cape Town bus terminus, mother and son would access town via the subterranean walkways of the Golden Acre Shopping Centre on the corner of Adderley and Strand streets. “At the time, the Golden Acre was this
place, socially and spatially,” says Robert. “The Foreshore had been reclaimed from the sea, and freeways had been cut not only around the city, but also through its centre. Louis effectively tied Cape Town back together again. The Golden Acre served as a crossing of the divide between the train station and the rest of town under the Strand Street highway. It had so many connections into town.
ABOVE, FROM LEFT Cape Town architect Robert Silke; the late famed architect Louis Karol; the Louis Karol-designed Mobil Court in Thibault Square, where Robert’s father used to work; one of the most recognisable Karol buildings in Cape Town, the Golden Acre Shopping Centre has longed served as a link between Cape Town station and the centre of town, via a network of neon-lit underground shopping concourses.
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PHOTOS MICHAEL LE GRANGE (ROBERT), BARRY LATEGAN (LOUIS KAROL), SUPPLIED
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obert Silke didn’t have the childhood of
