Skip to main content

45 years later

 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 House. It was originally the main branch of the United Building Society, an organisation with very modest beginnings, having been formed by a collaboration of working-class people who were helping each other to raise finances to build their own homes. By 1970, the financial house had assets of R680 million, and merged in the early 1990s to form ABSA Bank. The small building, with one side facing Gandhi Square, has its main entrance on Fox Street. It is not clear when the Building Society moved from these premises, but the upper floors of the building were used as apartments in the 1930s, and at some point, these upper floors were rented out as offices, with tenants including Bowman Gilfillan, long before they became the giant law firm that they are now.

Just last Saturday, the person who had "discovered" the building in 1980, Mark Hindson, and I went on a Joburg Heritage Foundation tour of the building, miraculously a survivor despite our fears in the early 1980s. Mark had saved all our 1980s photos and drawings to his phone, so we could make a thorough assessment of any modifications. The biggest change has been of the environment around the building - Gandhi square has had a major facelift from the grimy bus terminal of the 1980s and many of the buildings in the area and along Fox Street have been given a new lease of life, largely through the energy and vision of Olitzky Property Holdings, who started on an ambitious renewal project since the 1990s.

Facade facing Gandhi Square
Inside the building, many vivid memories surfaced. The three-storey atrium is the most striking aspect, now covered in a combination of metal sheeting and translucent panels. The original carved roof trusses have been preserved, as have many of the other details.
The atrium roof with its original roof trusses
Much of the floor in the atrium is intact, with its distinctive marble and dark stone chequerboard pattern, and the floors of the upper storey corridors still have most of their original glass-block insets, allowing more light into the ground floor.
The original flooring and much of the neoclassical detailing are still intact.
My most lasting memory of the building was the tiling, with its Art Nouveau decoration and subtly varying green background. Unfortunately, we could not access the basement, where the most elaborately decorated tiles lined the walls where the safe-deposit boxes were housed, along with a massive Chubb safe.
The Art Nouveau tiles with their moulded edging strips, precisely mitred at the staircase

We were able to see the upper floors, all empty at present, and still with evidence of habitation by the ubiquitous Joburg pigeons. Mark and I reminisced about the firm of dressmakers who occupied part of the top floor when we were measuring.

Glass-block panels in the top storey corridors and evidence of the pigeons
At the time this building was completed, it was quite impressive in its detailing throughout, with wrought-iron decorative balustrades and carved wooden staircase, slightly modified in the 1920s to accommodate a lift. We made detailed drawings of each and every element such that the building could be entirely reconstructed, if only in the imagination. 
The wrought-iron balustrade with its ornate brackets.
In a city that has seen so many buildings lost to redevelopment throughout its history, it was refreshing to see this one still in use after 120 years, despite our fears all those years ago.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to my blog

Sitting outside the Wits Architecture Building My name is Anne. I have just retired from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa where I was an Associate Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, working in the environmental engineering and project management domain. Prior to that, I was a lecturer in the School of Architecture and Planning, teaching many aspects of architecture, including architectural history, design and skills in graphics. Before lecturing at the University, I worked briefly in local government as a junior architect and then in a commercial firm of architects. After this I ran a private architectural practice with a focus on architectural heritage design. I have qualifications in architecture, construction management and employment creation through construction. Now that I have retired, I want to continue to provide educational context about architecture, engineering, design and project management in a different forum ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Flower Hall: Wits

As a child, I remember going to the annual Rand Show, hosted by the Witwatersrand Agricultural Society, one of the highlights of which was visiting the Flower Hall - a vast space carpeted from wall to wall with flowers. In more recent times, the land on which the Rand Show was housed was taken over by Wits, the University of the Witwatersrand, thereby doubling the area of the main campus, the original lands of which are immediately to the east. The soaring roofs of the Flower Hall: photo Jennifer Fitchett Wits has retained several of the original buildings, many of which have been retained largely in their original form, such as Hall 29 (used as a basketball venue and doubling up as a large exam venue) and the Wits Club and Alumni House which used to be the wine tasting venue at the Rand Show. Other buildings have their shell retained, but remodelled interiors, and the most ambitious recycling project was the Science Stadium, which ingeniously reused the stadium seating for the large l...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pergolas

  While packing to move house, my daughter found some sketches that I had done several years ago for a pergola outside her living room. The room has full-height glazing across the entire width of the east-facing room, making the whole flat very hot in summer. Pergolas are an excellent way of adapting your indoor temperature, especially if you use deciduous plants to cover them, providing shade to the window in summer and letting the winter sun into the room when the plants lose their leaves. They are one of the most cost-effective and environmentally sensitive ways to adapt indoor climate, on any sun-facing side of your home. In the southern hemisphere, pergolas or awnings can be quite narrow on the north side of the building - the sun angle at mid-day is about 70 degrees on the equinoxes, so the depth of the pergola should be about half the height of the window or glazed door so that the sun is not blocked through the winter.  The angle of the sun in summer, winter and at the...
Post a Comment
Read more