Johannesburg Style: Architecture and Society, 1880s-1960s. - book reviews

Architectural Review, The, March, 1995 by Catherine Slessor

Were it not for geology and capitalism, Johannesburg would never have existed. The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 precipitated a frantic surge of urbanisation in one of the most inhospitable parts of the African interior - a thousand miles from the Cape and nearly 400 miles from the nearest port, As a booming, muscular progeny of the Industrial Revolution, Johannesburg has much in common with the great conurbations of Manchester and Chicago, but it is also filled with contradictions. Provincial and colonial in locality, marginalised from metropolitan culture, it is nevertheless an arena of major importance, Clive Chipkin's scholarly yet exceptionally readable book traces Johannesburg's architectural and social evolution from nineteenth-century mining camp to twentieth-century city.

The spirit of entrepreneurship, coupled with the relentless pursuit of materialism set their unsentimental imprint on the city from its earliest days. The original street grid (based on standardised plot divisions measuring 50 x 100 Cape feet) represented, as Chipkin notes 'an open slate without predispositions - the perfect tabula rasa for the operation of a market economy', And indeed both the scale and scope of Johannesburg's architectural development have been consistently defined by the cyclic movements of the world's financial markets. For example the residential building boom of the 1890s was triggered by rocketing shares in Witwatersrand gold mines. Turreted and gabled villas of the emerging middle classes sprung up on the eastern peripheries and gardens were lavishly planted with exotica brought up from the coast by wagon. Instant ecological change was effected as tree-lined streets and lush suburbia were grafted on to the formerly tree-less plateau.

But Johannesburg's real history is one of succession, of a physical landscape continually rebuilt and recolonised. The Victorians were succeeded by the Edwardians and the administrators of Empire, Herbert Baker arrived in 1902 and spoke of a style of architecture appropriate to the searing highveld 'of cool recesses, of voids and spaces, and plain surfaces in deep shadow'. The Englishness of the 1920s was succeeded by the Americanism of the 1930s, which imported Art Deco and rampant skyscrapers, turning Johannesburg into an African Manhattan. With its rentier braggadocio and expanding infrastructure, Johannesburg was always a fertile breeding ground for new architecture and new ideas - yet paradoxically it also embodied an essentially provincial, lower-middle class, philistine culture. As Chipkin notes 'It felt like a place in some ways on the frontier of a new age and in other ways trammelled and contained by the frontier bigotry of the past. That is the essence of Johannesburg's heightened vulnerability, a glimpse of what it might be, contained by the limitations of what is'.

Chipkin's breadth of engagement across architecture, politics, society and culture is hugely engrossing. He traces the rise of Johannesburg Modernism, as Corbusian disciples such as Rex Martienssen sought to transplant the master's teachings to the Transvaal. The influence of Brazil was also apparent, particularly in the multi-storied apartment suburb of Hillbrow, which today has one of the highest population densities in the southern hemisphere. There are chapters on black townships and the callous politics of dispossession - a reminder that Johannesburg's wealth was generated at the expense of migrant labourers forced to endure appalling conditions. Johannesburg was and still is the ultimate destination of the rural poor - between 1936 and 1948 the city's African population swelled from quarter of a million to half a million. Through the euphemistically named 'Native Housing Policy', Johannesburg explicitly reflected the directives of an apartheid state obsessively concerned with power, hegemony and population control.

Chipkin's progress culminates in the 1960s, with a discussion of the Johannesburg-Philadelphia axis and how a new generation of young South African architects came under the spell of Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania. It seems a pity to stop there, an analysis of more recent political and architectural developments - the latest 'volatile expectations and uncertainties' - would have made an absorbing finale. Throughout its frenetic existence, Johannesburg is a prime and complex example of what Manfredo Tafuri calls the 'colonial capitalist city' fuelled by an entrepreneurial culture, which as Chipkin points out 'is not a negligible quality to be derided or treated lightly'. As South Africa steels itself for the next set of political and social convulsions, Johannesburg is fated to continue its madcap evolution, poetically encapsulated by Chipkin's assertion that - 'The capitalist city is never formed, always inchoate, always rebuilding with the debris from the demolitions on the sidewalk'.

CATHERINE SLESSOR