JOYCE OZYNSKI grieves over the lost architectural opportunities in Johannesburg’s Central Business District
THERE is some medicine for Johannesburg’s ugly, neglected Central Business District (CBD) that no one has yet prescribed. It is this: city council architects and town planners should be obliged to live and work in the centre of the CBD vortex before being allowed to work in it, or on it. For a year, at least.
This is strong medicine, to be sure. Imagine complacent civil servants climbing unlit stairwells, wrestling with broken stoves and toilets; stuck in grimy lifts; looking down at broken pavements – longing for a bit of grass, a few flowers, fresh air, a little park or square to sit in.
They would have to get around town on foot and learn the city foot-by-foot, inch-by- inch; getting to know its harsh surfaces; its dull colours and its shadeless heat. They would have to put up with the scarcity of benches, clocks, restrooms and public toilets.
This is undoubtedly the remedy for academic programmes that concentrate on sectarian quarrels, dogmatic formalism and dangerously intoxicating ideas of the architect as hero.
And it would sift out those who are really committed to their work from those who want to sit out the 20th century under a potted plant at the Civic Centre.
The misery of those who work and live in the city centre is palpable. Visitors from suburbia, in town for a brief inspection like anthropologists in a tropical jungle, will never have the compassion or practical knowledge to transform the city. Remember Johannesburg’s Civic Spine, the Library gardens and the Newtown Precinct …
The striking thing about the Library Gardens debacle was the obvious ignorance of the town planners of the way in which those spaces were successfully used – before they were destroyed.
A lack of respect for pedestrians and workers in that area underpinned the grossly inappropriate decisions that were made by town planning.
A similar mixture of ignorance and “architectural concepts” destroyed an aesthetically pleasing and functional space in front of St Mary’s cathedral in Plein Street.
Metal structures for hawkers were erected opposite the front doors of the church. A little further down the pavement, a council architect put up a small public toilet. The architect, who has since emigrated to Canada, apparently cherished the notion of echoing the cathedral’s forms in the much, much smaller building. Using pale brick, arched doorways with iron gates, a fussy tiled roof and a couple of carved wooden supports, he created something of a Walt Disney-in-Buchenwald effect. The simple lines and stone walls of the cathedral are impossible to relate to this painfully ugly structure.
His over-ingenious approach had blinded him to the fact that St Mary’s occupies a significant place in the struggle for democracy. Historic marches began in that very space. The church and the small piazza (now almost totally covered by the public toilet and hawkers’ stalls) have a history and a presence that should be respected. But the council bureaucrats did not know that, because they were safely cocooned in their offices when the marches and meetings and funeral services took place.
Perhaps the new councillors will do the right thing – scrape off those misplaced structures and repave the area with stone flags. No trees are needed. Just a bit of respect – respect, ultimately, for the people of Johannesburg.