Anne-apolis

  About a year ago, my daughter and her fiancé asked me if I would do the graphics for the place cards and seating layout for their wedding. They had already done a great job with the graphics for their engagement party, using Canva graphic design tool, but we thought it would be nice to have hand painted and hand-lettered graphics for the wedding itself. When I was a Second Year architecture student, at the end of the year we had a review of all our work prior to the oral presentations, and my lecturers had advised me to erase every piece of lettering on my drawings and re-do them. In the process, my lettering became much better, but this is a skill I have not used for many decades. Nevertheless, I pulled out a couple of lettering handbooks and a calligraphy set that my brother had passed on to me. A calligraphy handbook by Muriel Parker (1980) These were great, both to remind me of the very specific techniques, and to give us a wide selection of typefaces. The one book also had a...

  In several of my previous blogs, I have looked at aspects of Wits University, which has been my home-from-home since 1976 when I was a First Year architecture student. These have included green roofs , the Flower Hall , re-use of buildings , Universal Access , decorative details , and the doors of Hillman Building , where I still have an office. But today I want to step into the past, to explore how the main campus of Wits has evolved, in many ways mimicking the architecturally hybrid city of Johannesburg. The University evolved out of the School of Mines, based in the CBD next to the original railway station, in a stately building that still exists. In its new guise, it moved to the site of the present-day East Campus in Braamfontein, perched on a ridge which is the watershed of the Witwatersrand (water flows to the south into the Orange River and into the Atlantic Ocean, while water on the north flows eventually into the Indian Ocean). The original three buildings formed a dram...

  I can remember so many things my dad taught me, from how to hold a pencil, to fixing a petrol lawnmower, and even how to listen to classical music. The most dramatic of these "lessons" was when I was in my early teens and I had hit a cricket ball through one of the large windows (I was absolutely hopeless at cricket and most other ball games, so this was an accident waiting to happen!) My dad insisted that I should replace the glass, so he set up a deckchair outside and proceeded to instruct me. The first step was to remove all the broken glass. My dad was excellent at thinking beyond the task at hand, and suggested I use some old painting drop-cloths on both the inside of the room and the flowerbed directly outside to catch the glass splinters and chips of paint and putty. This is definitely a job for leather gloves - the tiny splinters of glass can pierce through even quite thick gardening gloves. This gave me an early appreciation for why construction workers prefer to w...

 Sometimes when looking through the photos of listings of homes for sale, I am struck by features that look out-of-place - whether because they give a shabby appearance to an otherwise great room, or because they look dated. If these are bedrooms or living rooms, these features can often be quite economical and cost-effective to remedy, whether for your own comfort or if you are planning to put your home on sale. In these rooms, the culprits are often damaged, faded or dated wall finishes - if painted, a new coat of paint in a tinted white would be my recommendation. While it is quite dramatic and trendy to use bold colours as an accent wall or even for a whole room, these can become limiting on any future plans for the room, and can negatively affect the perceptions of a prospective buyer. A tinted white gives a bit of character and liveliness to the space, rather than pure white, which can be quite sterile and harsh.  Wallpaper can be a bit more of a challenge - if it is sti...

  Last week I shared my experiences of visiting a  historical building  that I had not been inside for 45 years. After we had looked around Somerset House, the Heritage Foundation tour took us on a short walk around the area of Gandhi Square, down Fox Street and back on Main Street, where a number of older buildings have been rescued from demolition and given a new lease on life.  Gandhi Square has been an open space since the earliest days of the settlement, originally called Government Square with the first court house facing it. The square has a Blue Plaque commemorating the British Occupation of Johannesburg in the Anglo-Boer War. Later on in its history, the square became the central bus terminus and renamed Van der Bijl Square. I remember it well in the 1980s as a labyrinth of bus lanes and a visual cacophony of steel roofs to shelter the endless queues of waiting passengers. In 1999 the area was given a complete facelift, still retaining some of the bus functi...

 Back in 1981, when I was a final-year architecture student, one of my friends discovered a jewel of a building in the Johannesburg inner city that looked like it was imminently about to collapse or be demolished. Somerset House (built in 1906) had a glass-roofed atrium with many of the panes broken, and was being used as a shop for second-hand furniture and building materials, which were piled up throughout the three-storey building. The team T-shirt found among my heirloom clothes So three of us decided that it was urgent that we make detailed record, through photos and measured drawings, so that at least there would be complete information on the building that could be archived. Around this time, several historic buildings had been lost to demolition - to make way for the motorway through Parktown and other developments in this area, and down-town, the iconic Escom Building was imploded. This was  the tallest in the city at the time of its completion. But back to Somerset H...