Garden Gateway

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2000 by Catherine Slessor

New visitors' facilities for Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden sit lightly and elegantly in the landscape.

Stunningly encircled by mountains, the lush expanse of Cape Town's Kirstenbosch Garden constitutes the greatest botanical landscape in southern Africa. Yet reconciling the needs of a growing body of visitors with those of nature has always been a delicate balancing act. Following intensive research over a number of years, the National Botanical Institute of South Africa decided to consolidate and enlarge visitor facilities which had long proved incapable of meeting demand. Designed by David Lewis and GAPP Architects, the new visitors' interpretation and information centre joins a restaurant by the same architects and recently completed greenhouse on a sloping site in the lower garden precinct. The complex defines an eastern edge to the garden and is intended to limit development within Kirstenbosch itself. An area for car and coach parking was reclaimed from a waste swamp and deliberately restricted to encourage the use of public transport.

Contained in a series of low-rise pavilions, the new visitors' centre forms a civic gateway to the garden. The complex houses a range of information, retail, conference and administrative facilities together with external public spaces. Planning has a formal elegance and economy, yet also generates a sense of intimacy, enclosure and human scale in the awesome landscape. The various elements are arranged around a stepped courtyard, with the monumental glasshouse presiding at the head of the composition. Views of the garden bowl and mountainside frame the angular roofscape. Basking in the dizzying light of vast African skies, the presence of the garden is palpable. A pavilion addresses the car park, signifying entrance. Slim, arboreal columns and roof beams allude to the ficus trees that run along the western boundary of the site. Extending out from the pavilion is a large loggia, which in time will be colonized by deciduous local vines, forming a green gateway.

The pavilion on the east side of the courtyard contains a cafe and shops, including a Botanical Society bookshop, linked by an internal street. On the west side, a trio of exhibition foyers connects with a 350 seat conference hall. The glazed west wall overlooks a sheltering canopy of huge golden ficus, under which the building gently nestles. Water is channelled around the perimeter of the upper level courtyard, soothing the senses and mitigating the blare of traffic on nearby Rhodes Drive. Timber pergolas bound both upper and lower courts, forming a support for more indigenous greenery. A network of steps and ramps leads up through the courtyards to a wrought iron gate marking the original point of entry when the garden first opened in 1912.

The architectural language of sturdy walls and corrugated steel roofs evokes the potting sheds and nursery buildings that formerly occupied the site. This spare functionalism is continued in the restaurant, located on the western edge of the visitors' centre. Supported by timber trusses and arboreal columns, the restaurant's great monopitch roof recalls the traditional African stoep or veranda. Nature is brought closer through full-height glass walls. Plaster tinted to match the colour of the soil and local rosa stone gives the entire complex an immemorial, rooted quality, as if it had always been part of Kirstenbosch's remarkable landscape.