Matthew Krouse
Johannesburg’s Newtown cultural precinct’s rather tarnished image as the social hub of the great African city has been amply lambasted.
Suburbanites now bypass the city centre, believing it has fallen apart – especially Newtown, with its derelict buildings crowded with squatters, revelling township drunkards and stoned teenage ravers.
So a visionary new scheme, unleashed at a function at the Market Theatre on Tuesday, won’t do much to placate critics of the precinct. But then it’s only emigration that will.
It’s a master plan that hopes to improve the life of the area by bringing to it new concepts about shopping, living, recreation and cultural production.
The major proponent of the idea, art dealer Ricky Burnett, is a well-known figure in that neck of the woods. Anyone who worked there in the earlier part of the decade will recall his business – aptly named Newtown Galleries – that hosted many pioneering, and still unsurpassed, exhibitions of African art from the far corners of the continent. And while doing business at one of the precinct’s outdoor restaurants, he’d hold forth on his vision for the Newtown redevelopment.
With his long-term plan now out the closet, it seems what Burnett was pondering was a way to spice up the cultural precinct with everything from a health club to indoor restaurants amid hanging gardens, a hotel, an art gallery, skywalks and an indoor suburb of shops and homes.
Newtown & Culture-as-Habitat, a study funded by the Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, is a 40-page blueprint for the reconstruction of Turbine Hall, and its adjoining lots and boiler houses.
City dwellers are all too familiar with the decaying Turbine Hall, built in the late 1920s, with its imposing three-storey brick facade and tall, shattered windows. As a midpoint between the cultural precinct and the bustling city, it stands as a no-go area, prohibiting the free flow of passage of those who wish to dabble in culture after their day’s work.
Those who know Turbine Hall will also know of its inhabitants, who have built a ramshackle squatter camp within its crumbling walls. It is these gutter rats who have provided Burnett with the seed of his inspiration, one that may ultimately lead to the resurrection of the very space within which they live.
“One of the ideas that underlies every assertion that I’m making in my document,” Burnett says about the squatters, is that “to regenerate the city you have to look at what is now marginalised, what is now only partly valued, or not valued at all. Things that are liabilities.
“We have to start to reimagine them, allowing the marginal a centre stage. We have to accept that the monotheistic powers of the corporate chequebook have left behind them a legacy that is half dead anyway.”
What Burnett is referring to is the encroaching business district of the city that could well consume the disused Newtown buildings in years to come. Therefore, the Turbine Hall “dead zone” is in many ways a symbol of the two legitimate forces that would like to see a rebirth in the city centre.
It’s a case of business versus pleasure, with Burnett being one of the die-hard proponents of the idea that, in the long term, the cultural precinct can survive.
“The idea of a cultural precinct doesn’t mean that you must keep out the real issues in the name of art. But it means that you bring in the real issues of the city, and you create an environment where people engage imaginatively in what most concerns them,” he says.
“The question is: how does everyone live together in the city, and how do you package it all together? I think there’s enough space. I think there are enough physical opportunities to engage with all issues.
`And what I suppose needs to happen is that the corporate world needs to realise that it is only one of the players, it is not the only nor indeed the most important player, irrespective of chequebook power.”
Burnett brought on board long-time friend and associate Mick Pearce, of the Harare company Pearce Partnership Architects. Together, they took as their beginning point Pearce’s ground- breaking Eastgate Harare development – a city street that has been converted into a three-storey walkway, lined with offices and shops.
The Newtown designs, however, have a more colourful, eclectic aesthetic. They are a stylistic combination of North African mud dwellings, coupled with the eccentric buildings of Spain’s Gaudi and Austria’s Hundertwasser.
Inside the Turbine Hall, organically shaped houses – in a form called “swallow architecture” – will double up as shops. Outdoors, at night, a large amphitheatre will show movies on a three-storey screen. The proposed art gallery, intended to house the important Brent- hurst collection, Burnett likens to Paris’s Pompidou Centre or the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.
It’s a vast exercise in social engineering that, with enough support, could radically alter Johannesburg’s public face.
With optimism, Burnett notes: “Johannesburg may be remembered for more than just mine dumps and the Hillbrow tower, in years to come.”