Feature: Tennis shelter

The completed tennis shelter in October 1950.

Images: Clive Hicks

Of labour and friendship

Sometimes big treasures arrive in small packages. Few of us would give the tennis shelter on the East Campus a second look. It is functional and rather ordinary looking — a good place to shelter from the rain or sun or take a break from a tennis game sipping an ice-cool drink. But how many of us would recognise that this structure is a heritage building dating back to 1950? This small building links a few important figures in architecture.

BY KATHY MUNRO

The tennis shelter was built by Professor John Fassler (BArch 1932), some staff and second-year students as a practical project in design and construction. It was functional, fun, made for bonding among students that could last a lifetime and promote teamwork.

Mira Fassler (BArch 1961), daughter of John, who took over design of Senate House [now Solomon Mahlangu House] when her father died prematurely in 1971, explained the purpose of the project of student engagement in design: “This was an annual project. The philosophy behind it was that architectural students should have some practical knowledge of building”.

I discovered the tennis shelter when Denise Scott Brown (DArch honoris causa 2011) sent a wonderful selection of 30 black-and-white photographs of the 1950 class at work. It covers the erection of the tennis shelter from the laying of the foundation stone to the erection of the roof and copies of these historic photos have now passed to the archive of the Wits.

The construction of the tennis shelter with Professor Fassler.

The late Clive Hicks (BArch 1957), a London-based architect, photographer, writer and ballet dancer, took the photographs. Scott Brown writes:

“Clive was in our class and younger than me. He was bright and, following a Wits fashion at the time, he studied ballet. When Clive graduated, he left for England and for the first year of his career he danced at Sadlers Wells where he was admired for his ‘lift’. Then went back to practising architecture in London. But he also made a hobby of photographing leaf-man sculpture in gothic architecture, and he wrote a book on it.”

Turning over these photographs is rather like watching an old black-and-white movie. There is a spirit of youthful enthusiasm, fun and pleasure of community. They are action shots. It is nostalgic, a moment frozen in time.

Denise Lakofski

Scott Brown (née Lakofski) remembers the photograph of herself as a 17-year-old student at the time, hands in big gardening gloves (see pic): “I was hanging over the wall, ‘Kilroy-was-here’ style. I had in fact just inscribed in the wet mortar at the top of the wall a line of poetry, ‘Say not the struggle nought availeth’ by Arthur Hugh Clough. It was a comment on our construction work.”

She married Robert Scott Brown (BArch, 1954) and in 1955 they travelled abroad. Although she did not complete her degree at Wits, she went on to study at London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture. The couple returned to South Africa but later went to the US to study with Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania. Robert was killed in an auto accident in 1959 and Denise married the American architect Robert Venturi in 1967. Together they achieved fame with the publication of Learning from Las Vegas (MIT Press, 1972) as well as designing the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London. (See WITSReview Vol 45).

Diana Evenary (BArch 1953) married Bernard Kirsch (MBBCh 1950) and they too emigrated to the US. She established her career as an architect in New York, later settling in San Francisco. She married again as Goldstein.

Another young architectural student who features in these photographs is the liberation struggle figure, Arthur Goldreich. He was a successful young artist in South Africa in the 1950s. Although he studied architecture he did not graduate from Wits. Instead, he purchased Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia with lawyer Harold Wolpe, which became the headquarters of the then banned African National Congress and its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. In 1963 both Goldreich and Wolpe were arrested but escaped from Marshall Square and fled from South Africa.

Fassler was the inspiring presence directing, organising and leading students in the project. Mira recalls: “My father was a great believer in giving students some practical knowledge of building. He was an accomplished bricklayer himself! He built many things in the gardens of our homes from walls to paving.”

Fassler joined the staff of Wits as a young academic in 1934 and was an outstanding draughtsman and watercolourist who first came to the attention of Professor Geoffrey Eastcott Pearce when he was selected to help in the compilation of his magnum opus on 18th century Cape architecture. He became a partner in the legendary but short-lived partnership of Robert Scott Brown, Rex Martienssen (BArch 1930, MArch 1940, DLitt 1941), John Fassler and Bernard Cooke (DipArch 1933, BArch 1942, PDTP 1949) in the mid-1930s. The partnership gave him stature and early prominence set aflame by the exciting local take on the modern movement in Johannesburg. He was a member of the young Transvaal group of architects admired and praised by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier.

On the early death of Martienssen in 1942, Fassler was promoted to a senior lectureship and on the retirement of his mentor Professor Pearse in 1948, he was made chair of architecture and became the head of department.

Fassler left a huge legacy in his design of a number of important buildings at Wits: the Wits Dental Hospital – now the School of Arts (1951); the Gate House on the East Campus (1967); the John Moffat Building (1959) and Senate House (now Solomon Mahlangu), designed in 1967 and under construction at the time of his death. The tennis shelter is Fassler’s smallest Wits building but it demonstrates his values and teaching style.

Construction of the tennis shelter by second year architectural students.

Steve Cope, Philipe Maucorps, Johah Glazer, Denise Lakofski, Arthur Goldreich, Gordon Hood, Diana Evenary.

Clive Hicks (1932-2017) was 16 years old at the time and was the youngest member of the "tennis shelter" group, seen here unloading a delivery of scaffolding.

Sources: Artefacts; Wikipedia; Gilbert Herbert: “Through a Rear View Mirror – Recollections of the School of Architecture,

Wits University, 1942-1947”. Lecture at Wits Oct 2010; Personal correspondence with Denise Scott Brown and Mira Fassler.