Tom Quoin : Architecture
As we recover from the season of ritual ceremony, let’s glance at one of the ways we celebrate what stands all about us – buildings. It’s heartening to realise that even in Egoli – the tense, unbending Jo’burg – some architects have thought to include relief carvings or sculpted castings in their designs. There they are, set in stone and metal for us to enjoy and, not infrequently, to reject.
Start at the Anglo American head offices on the eastern rim of the city, at the core of the county’s now ailing mining industry. There, on the bleak, even brutal facades of 40 Fox Street, we find a series of relief- cut panels that project from the spandrels under some of the windows. These are carvings of familiar South African animals, birds, plants. Densely packed as they are, these crisp, cleanly defined figures seem, at once, to be contained by and to spill over the edges of the panels. Spandrels and figures are active, fluid, pulsing with life.
Look carefully: each stylised wing, limb, leaf or bloom is about to leap from its stone base into the highveld atmosphere; into the sharp sunlight that distinguishes them so clearly. This is top-notch carving – fixed, sadly, to a coarse, ungainly building.
Then cross to 44 Main Street, to the uncomfortably fascistic north front of Anglo’s other block in the area. Here the carving, though in a more shallow relief, is no less vigorous. Now, at close-up pavement level, we confront a more restrained elegance. Again the wildlife, the untamed vegetation; here formalised in low-cut incisions that readily catch the movement of massive elephants, fleeting buck, hadedahs and delicate veld grasses. Again a crisp response to our vivid local light. Again the fine craft of stone carving has, in the same flourish, caught activity and serenity. And again we note a celebration of the Victorian-Edwardian, the imperial impulse to capture, to possess all in the far-off colonial dominions.
For more of that cast of thought, walk eastward along Main Street to the deeply incised frieze at the entrance to the Chamber of Mines building. No fluid motion in this depiction of a selected history, quite the contrary. These are static, lifeless stereotypes – black people who labour and die while whites discover, create, think, declaim … and shoot. Not unlike – now strolling northward – the shallow relief at Volkskas, 74 Market Street: crudely carved scenes from a wished- for South Africa in which blacks toil at menial tasks while whites watch, instruct, administer … make history?
Last, a quick walk to the old De Villiers Street entrance of Park Station. Look up to the three stone-carved elephant heads – flattened, unimposing representations of creatures which are anything but that. Above them there’s another frieze, on this occasion in bronze.
It’s a tale of progress – from African bearers to an oxwagon, a horse-drawn carriage and then a railway engine plus its coaches. Look again, to find yourself moving from naive innocence to sophisticated technology; courtesy, no doubt, of white enterprise … plus black sweat.