According to veteran South African architect Loius Karol, his profession ‘is very important”. As he speaks, his voice is considered, retaining the slightest trace of a foreign accent. ‘We create the built environment. Except for the eight hours we are asleep and unaware, we’re living, learning, working, walking, shopping in this environment.”
Karol is the guest of honour at next week’s 2002 Adventures Architecture Conference in Bloemfontein, which celebrates the 75th anniversary of the South African Institute of Architects. This year is also the 50th anniversary of one of South Africa’s most successful firms, Louis Karol Architects.
When world leaders gather in Johannesburg’s Sandton Conference Centre at the end of this month it will be under Karol’s roof. Older Jo’burgers will know his facetted 80m skyscraper at 11 Diagonal Street well, while younger Jozi inhabitants will be more familiar with The Zone in Rosebank. But it’s for his work at the coast that Karol has earned his informal nickname: ‘the man who built Cape Town”.
Karol arrived in Cape Town as an eight-year-old Lithuanian refugee in 1936, docking where the V&A Waterfront is today. Sixty years later he had built most of the Waterfront, including the hugely successful mall, Victoria Wharf. Louis Karol Architects’s latest project in the area was the impressive BoE building in the Clocktower precinct.
Victoria Wharf was exactly in Karol’s line — the architect loves to create what he calls ‘people’s places”. One of his first major projects in the 1970s was the Golden Acre, an underground mall he is still proud of for the way it integrates bus, train and foot routes in an otherwise unnavigable part of the central business district. At the head of St George’s Mall he designed Thibault Square. The awesome Engen and Safmarine House buildings are also Karol’s. In Strand street perhaps his most well-known building is the Cape Sun, with its external lift like a bright bubble bouncing in a builder’s level.
Despite his design excellence, Karol has a philosophical attitude towards great buildings: ‘You’re always going to find the exception. You have great writers in society, but the common denominator is the most important: what’s most important is that all kids can learn to read and write. In the built environment the most important question is ‘What is the quality of the majority being built?”’
Still, he does despair about the apparent blind eye turned towards architectural design in this country, speaking about the New York Times‘s architectural correspondent in the 1970s, Paul Goldberg, ‘propelling the popularity of the top architects. If one is so desperate to slip into Prada pumps, why not hound a Revel Fox apartment? ‘The media needs to condition our clients to demand better buildings, demand better urban design,” he says.
For those who want to know more about the environment we spend almost all our time in, the 2002 Adventures Architecture Conference comes recommended.
Louis Karol will speak at the 14th Sophia Grey Memorial Lecture at 7pm August 29 at the Sedcom Auditorium, Fairview Street, Bloemfontein. Free to the public. An exhibition of his work will be showing for a month at the Oliewenhuis Art Museum in Harry Smith Street, opening August 29. Also happening are an Architectural Film Festival at the Ster-Kinekor, Mimosa Mall, and the SAIA Rome Scholarship 2003 and Murray and Roberts Des Baker Competitions. Limited space is available for the lecture series. For more information call Jan Willem Ras, Tel: (051) 447 1730