Negotiating Modernism in Cape Town: 1918-1948
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The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University Negotiating Modernism in Cape Town: 1918-1948 An investigation into the introduction, contestation, negotiation and adaptation of modernism in the architecture of Cape Town. Town Cape of University André van Graan A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics University of Cape Town ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the many people who made this thesis possible: Lesley Hart and the staff of Manuscripts and Archives at UCT The staff at the Cape Archives The staff of the National Library of South Africa‟s Cape Town campus Dr. Eitan Karol for sharing his knowledge and expertise Sally Titlestad for offering technical assistance to a non-computer literate researcher. Ashley Lillie for supplying obscure references and much encouragement Dr. Antonia Malan for encouragement and expertise My partner, Tertius van Niekerk for his unstinting support Douw Moolman, for keeping the household fed and in one piece Town Professor Anthony Staak of CPUT for his support during my studies. Professor Johannes Cronje, the Dean of the Faculty of Informatics & Design at CPUT The Cape Peninsula University of Technology for all theCape assistance both financial and moral on this chosen path of Professor Iain Low- a supportive and encouraging supervisor, who cut through the rhetoric with his honest and critical comment. All my friends and family in Cape Town, Johannesburg and abroad for their personal and academic support University This thesis is dedicated to my mother and the memory of my father, who believed in me and made it possible for me to reach for my dreams no matter what the odds. i ABSTRACT THE NEGOTIATION OF MODERNISM IN CAPE TOWN 1918-1948 In the early twentieth century modernism radically changed the world, affecting all aspects of life. Twentieth century modernism incorporated new inventions that changed the modes of travel, it re- structured methods of production and the way in which people lived, worked and played. This radical change was to be reflected in all sectors, and was particularly manifested physically in architecture. Modernism demanded a radical shift from an architecture that had been slowly evolving from nineteenth century eclecticism, overlaid with reactionary concerns for the overwhelming impact of industrialisation on society and on the built fabric of cities. It sought to identify new ways of dealing with these issues and finding new methods of spatial production and ultimately creating a new means of architectural aesthetic expression that came to be referred to as the Modern Movement. The response to the radical change implied in modernism resulted in a process of negation and contestation, leading through negotiation to a mediated compromise before an ultimate acceptance. Town The epicentre for these developments was Europe, particularly in Germany but also in France. As this radicalised approach to architecture spread out from here it underwent a series of metamorphoses as it was challenged, negotiated and ultimately absorbed into local architectural practice around the world. However, away from WesternCape Europe, modern architecture came to be, as Sibel Bozdoğan (2001) points out in her studyof of the introduction of modernism into Kemalist Turkey, a representation of modernity without, necessarily, its material and social basis. In colonial and former colonial countries such as South Africa in particular, modernism did not have the strong socialist concern for improving the well-being of its entire people, but rather became primarily a mechanism for improving production, restructuring urban areas into racially and physically segregated areas and dealing with issues around health and slum clearance. It also became an aesthetic ofUniversity the urban avant-garde. More often than not, it was a mediated modernist aesthetic that characterized modernism rather than a new approach to the production of space. Johannesburg has always been regarded as the place where this introduction and adaptation took place in South Africa, as it was introduced into the academic architectural programme at Witwatersrand University, championed by the architect and academic, Rex Martienssen and a group of his fellow academics and local architects. Gilbert Herbert (1975) described this process of introduction and it has long been held that the ripples of modernism were gradually to spread to other centres in South Africa from Johannesburg. However, the issue of modernism that was debated and experimented with in Johannesburg was essentially formalist and focussed largely on housing for a middle-class White proletariat. It did not challenge the existing order on any other ii basis than the notion that modernism was an international Zeitgeist that needed to be assimilated into South African architectural practice. But this is not the case in the way in which modernism was introduced in Cape Town, nor did it follow the same process of assimilation. This research seeks to identify the unique way that modernism was introduced, negotiated and ultimately assimilated into architectural practice in the city. In Cape Town the end of the First World War marked a significant break with the nineteenth century colonialism that had still permeated the city in the opening decades of the twentieth century and can be identified as the point at which modernism began o impact on the city. Likewise, 1948 marked the coming to power of the Nationalist Party, bringing with it the adoption of modernism as a mechanism of State. The modern architecture of the period is examined within the framework of architectural culture, linking modernism to issues of social engineering- issues that lie beyond form making alone. Bozdoğan (2001:12) again suggests that a study needs to examine buildings, projects and architectural writings as a collectively constituted discourse. She argues that The idea behind the study of architectural culture is not to explain the work through what was said and written about it but to see the ways in which what was said, written and built, collectively confirm, interpret, contest, or negotiateTown the political and ideological agendas of the time. In the first place, what makes South Africa uniquely different to other countries is that in the Thirties it was not only a colonial country, albeit with dominionCape status, strongly influenced by its links to Great Britain, but also its form of political control in theof twentieth century was still fundamentally racist. This is evident in the manner in which people where treated and discriminated against at all levels of political control, and spatial practice was used to reinforce these racial constructs and create mechanisms of control. The architecture of the period presented a simulacrum of modernism with few of the underlying catalysts and concerns that led to its implementation in Europe. This thesis proposes that it was this underlying concern with control and power that was to create a representation of negotiatedUniversity modernism in Cape Town, whose unique characteristics were embodied into a project of social engineering on a citywide scale. James C. Scott (1998) in describing what he called „Authoritarian High Modernism‟ identified three characteristics: firstly the wish to order society; secondly, the unbridled use of power to achieve this; and thirdly, a weakened civil society that does not have the ability to resist these plans. (Scott: 88-89) It is this form of the implementation of modernism in Cape Town that made it unique not only in South Africa but also in relation to other cities in the world. Modernism was adopted by the city council for the design of housing for the city‟s poor. (Jeppie 2001: 116; van Graan 2004) Here it was linked to issues of health and race and became the tool for the implementation of racially based housing policy, and modernist design principles were adapted to create new forms of housing for the African and Coloured sectors of the population. iii This was closely linked to town planning considerations that were used to create separate residential areas, removed from the city, for the creation of ethnically based housing. (Pinnock 1989:157) Even the types of accommodation, based closely on European prototypes, reinforced the precepts of social engineering. As the dominant informant of social engineering, modernism was used to inform the triad: housing, health and the workplace to create an environment that sought to control the lives of the disempowered people of colour at all levels. Fundamental to the introduction of modernism into architectural praxis in Cape Town is the notion of negotiation. Modernism did not overwhelm the existing order in the city overnight. Unlike Johannesburg, the conservative Cape School of Architecture located within the Michaelis art school was not sympathetic to the need for change, nor was there any architect, much less any academic, to espouse the cause of modernism and to champion it as had happened in Johannesburg (Herbert 1975). Instead it was the local Cape Town-based media, represented by the professional journal, The Architect, Builder and Engineer that was the mouthpiece for debate around modernism in the city. This remained the status quo until the appointment of Leonard Thornton White as Professor of Architecture at the University of Cape Town in 1937. Even then, with the intervention of World War Two, it was only after the war thatTown modernism really came to be widely accepted as the norm in the city. This research examines the professional architectural media in South Africa as a terrain of negotiation.