Eccentric heritage sites
Architect and historian Clive Chipkin lists his choice of the more unusual structures in Johannesburg, on and just below the Witwatersrand. You could view them all on an easy Sunday drive of 7km
The ‘Arc de Triomphe’
The Rand Regiments Memorial is situated on the Houghton-Saxonwold plain — a triumphal arch by the English architect Edwin Lutyens who, with Herbert Baker, designed several government buildings in New Delhi. In fact, our monument is the predecessor to Lutyens’ All India War Memorial Arch on the Rajpath in the Indian capital.
In the mid-1920s, land surveyor Charles Presswell Tomkins, learning from the contemporary New Delhi precedent, designed the road pattern of Saxonwold so that Lutyens’ arch was the end point of Eastwold Way, Johannesburg’s lesser Champs-Élysées. Here, this axial planning with its aura of symmetry looks not only to New Delhi and Paris, but also to Papal planning at the Piazza del Popolo in Rome.
But the precedents are more complex. We must look to ancient Egypt as the source with its stylobate temple fronts, obelisks — those statements of divine authority — and the straight-as-adie avenue of sphinxes on pedestals between Luxor and Karnak temples. Ancient Egypt is the origin of Eastwold Way.
Up and over the Witwatersrand
Above the Houghton-Saxonwold plain are the Houghton ridge and the Orange Grove escarpment, key parts of the Witwatersrand chain of modest hills. Dr Jeffreys, an anthropologist well remembered from the 1950s, traced the name back to 1854, possibly earlier.
Two mountain passes provide access to the high ground: Munro Drive on the north, winding from Houghton up to the rising ground of the Yeoville plateau; and Stewart Drive on the south, winding down to the long valley that was once the site of old Bezuidenhout’s farm Doornfontein. A few 150-year-old giant blue-gums, with trunks 10m in girth, remain. Both passes were constructed with kopje-stone retaining walls: Stewart Drive in 1935 with low-arched parapets to allow stormwater run-off; and Munro Drive, rebuilt in 1938, with a dramatic 15m-high hair-pin bend retaining wall, built in random ashlar stone with text-book precision.
From Munro Drive, the view to the north is across sloping valleys up to the first mountain horizon, the Magaliesberg — the old Cashan Mountains resonating with history.
From near Stewart Drive, the view south is towards the Klipriviersberg and the Vaal, the old Ka Gariep.
I have avoided describing the open high ground with its overview of Hillbrow and the historic CBD. This ground has become a sacred prayer site for insecure émigrés from distant Africa and I, for one, do not wish to intrude in the future.
Yeoville Water Tower
The Yeoville reservoir (circa 1903) was built on the highest point of the Yeoville ridge. Clearly, the random kopje-stone, inclined retaining walls relate to the precedent of the stone walled dams and reservoirs built by the Birmingham City Corporation from 1896 and opened by King Edward VII in 1904.
The adjacent steel construction of the Yeoville Water Tower (which Van der Waal dates from 1913, whereas my records suggest an earlier date) is an urban tour-deforce, a brilliant design, not a mere historic curiosity. Its presence helps define Yeoville as a distinct local sub-region; a diverse and stimulating environment over the generations.
The design retains the unmistakable origins of Wilhelmine Germany; facsimiles stood in the Ruhr.
The steel-plated spherical water tank is cradled on a high trestle with diagonal bracing. Vertical and horizontal catwalks and orbitral balconies envelope the spherical container, creating an interplay of geometrical forms that anticipated the Russian Constructivists of the 1920s. The ridge ventilator and fleche are an anomaly — a Gothic clerical touch implanted on an industrial aesthetic to make it congenial to a residential lower middle-class environment — a telling piece of historical evidence.
Yeoville’s 2nd Water Tower
The reinforced concrete water tower with a capacity of 250 000 gallons dates from 1936 and stands near its steel counterpart, an icon competing for prominence.
The engineer R Fredman wrote in 1964: “Although a spherical steel tower already stood in the vicinity, reinforced concrete was chosen because of its practicability and its superior aesthetic values.”
This is a surprising comment, as the spirited design of the former contrasts with the prosaic design of the latter. Nevertheless, there is a hidden undertone in the 1930s tower which cannot be ignored.
This early example of exposed concrete is clearly based on contemporary British civilengineering practice with little, if any, architectural input. The infiltration of external ideas came from Italian Futurism, that heady brew that came out of Milan and Turim. But not directly. This is Futurism at second- or third-hand — cast in concrete.