Anne-apolis

  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...

On 24 September every year, South Africa celebrates Heritage Day as a public holiday; an opportunity to reflect on our richly diverse origins and cultures and to engage in tours and other events that allow us to explore the many historical threads and their associated artefacts.  Fortuitously, I was in a postgraduate symposium just last week in which one of my former students, now a member of staff in the Wits School of Architecture and Planning, was presenting his work on the Johannesburg Art Gallery, where he has been serving as heritage consultant for the past couple of years. Johannesburg Art Gallery entrance Creative commons licensed:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:9_2_228_0069-Art_Gallery-Johannesburg-s.jpg The Gallery (or JAG, as it is often called), was designed in 1910 by one of the most prominent architects in the English-speaking world at the time, Edwin Lutyens. He was also the designer of the War Memorial in the Johannesburg Zoo, a striking landmark when...

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 ...