Government precinct will scar Jozi
October 27, 2005 Edition 1
I am a third-year architecture student at Wits University, and am appalled at the South African Heritage Resources Agency's (SAHRA) decision to tear down ten inner-city buildings.
Johannesburg is undergoing a rejuvenation, a redevelopment in which the inner-city will become a place where people want to go, where business is successful and crime has diminished.
The process is on track and it's wonderful to see the signs of a changing city already.
The agency's decision, however, throws a massive hurdle that will create an empty void - a scar on the social and architectural profile of our city.
I find it incomprehensible that an organisation which calls itself a heritage agency can so blatantly act against the heritage of our city.
We are just over 100 years old, and should be preserving our past against the blanking out of memory and erasure of culture.
I was already worried when half of the Turbine Hall - a building of deep historical significance - was demolished to make way for big business.
An agency like SAHRA should have a strong backbone. It should be defending our heritage against big business and politics, but alas, this is an incredibly sad time for Johannesburg and all the people who have tried so hard to turn it around.
SAHRA's decision might have had a completely different response if the demolition of the buildings was making way for a building which would enhance the city; celebrating its future, embracing its past, iconic in its design and monumental in its reception.
The Gauteng Governmental Precinct will in no way stand up to any of those points.
Many of us have seen the design and feel that it will indeed burn a wound into the city. It is not of the architectural standard we would expect to see in Johannesburg.
The Metro Mall and Constitution Hill developments have shown us how architecture could be created in our city, and this falls far from it.
It is not only the heavy handedness of the architect, but his complete inflexibility which has us bewildered.
There are many wonderful ways in which this project could be designed, but NOA Architects seems to have been given the job of designing it. This is an incredibly large-scale urban design project being operated by a firm which has not proved itself at all.
The NOA tried to uplift the fashion district by paving mosaic strips into the sidewalk and littering the pavement with arbitrary steel sculptural forms, and where does the fashion district stand now? In the same place it has always been, only with better earrings.
Just look at Braamfontein. The firm Albonico Sachs Masimura has achieved wonders in reviving this place. Crime is down and people are walking through the city like never before.
The architect students at Wits drafted a petition, and in one day were able to get over 100 signatures.
The whole city does not want to see an already underutilised public space made even bigger at the expense of our heritage.
I feel that the provincial government is guilty for pushing for this hare-brained scheme, and should have not accepted it in the first place.
The onus now lies on the national government to realise that they are committing a crime against all of us.
Guy Trango
Johannesburg
