Minimum Documentation Fiche 2003 composed by national/regional working party of: South Africa by Ilze Wolff 0.1 Picture of building/site

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1 Minimum Documentation Fiche 2003 composed by national/regional working party of: South Africa by Ilze Wolff 0.1 Picture of building/site Depicted item: Werdmuller Centre various views of the curvilinear ramps linking east and west. Source: Heinrich Wolff Date: Identity of building/group of buildings/urban scheme/landscape/garden 1.1 current name of building Werdmuller Centre 1.2 variant or former name none 1.3 number & name of street Main Rd, between Newry and Ralph Streets 1.4 town Claremont, Cape Town

2 1.5 province/state Western Cape 1.6 zip code country South Africa 1.8 national grid reference GPS Co-ordinates: Lat Long classification/typology Commercial Shopping Centre 1.10 protection status & date none 2 History of building 2.1 original brief/purpose Department store and apartments. 2.2 dates: commission/completion architectural and other designers Roelof S Uytenbogaardt 2.4 others associated with building Professor Dave Dewar, Fabio Todeschini 2.5 Significant alterations with dates Upper terrace on Main rd side enclosed mid 1980 s Bridge linking Eastern and Western side of the building mid 1980 s 2.6 Current use Mostly unused with some shops in operation. 2.7 Current condition The building is in relatively good condition despite a lack of maintenance.

3 3 Description 3.1 General description The Werdmuller Centre is a now defunct shopping centre and was completed in Its owners, South African Mutual Life Assurance Society now called Old Mutual, employed the services of Professor Roelof Uytenbogaardt (b d.1998) for the design on the building. The building was aimed to attract the many pedestrians that would pass through the building from the main road to the station and back. It was conceived as a department store catering for small businesses and local traders. Halfway through the construction process the client acquired additional land to the east of the site and required the architect to alter the design to accommodate the extra land. The resultant design is an off-shutter concrete extroverted box with an elaborate curvilinear ramp that not only connects the station and the main road but also tries to resolve the tie between the original property and the additional property. 3.2 Construction The construction is reinforced off shutter concrete and glass. 3.3 Context Urban context it sits within the commercial centre of Cape Town s suburbs, Claremont. Claremont is an upper-middleclass residential suburb and the main road is a busy commercial hub, catering to all income levels. A curious phenomenon exists where the eastern and western side of the main road caters to opposite income levels the east to the poor and the west to the rich. The Werdmuller Centre is situated on the eastern side of the main rd. Because of its location the owners have since its inception, struggled to attract the right customers. The building became a financial burden for its clients and they are currently seeking a demolition permit. 4 Evaluation 4.1 Technical In the Werdmuller Centre the off-shutter concrete work is designed and executed in an expressive manner, the quality of which is rarely found in South Africa. The custom designed window and door frames are chrome plated and archival photos show elaborate mobile timber shutters presumably for the offices and apartments on the eastern side. 4.2 Social The time that the design of the building was conceived (1969) and eventually executed (1976) is an immensely politically volatile period for South Africa and the Werdmuller Centre must be read within this context. Firstly, in the year that the design was accepted 1969 Claremont was proclaimed a whites only area under the Group Areas Act of This meant that certain areas, like Claremont, were reserved for residence and occupation by specific racial groups within the population, i.e. whites.

4 It is presumably for this reason that Uytenbogaardt and his team designed the building so that it becomes a place where the displaced non-white traders and shopkeepers could find an affordable place to trade. Secondly, the shopping mall is unique in that it caters for the pedestrian, and therefore for the lowest income group (in South Africa, ownership of a vehicle is generally designated to the rich.) Thirdly, and this relates both to the first and second point, it is positioned in such a way close to all major transport terminals - as to attract customers (and traders) from all income groups, which, in the segregated South African context of the sixties and seventies is an extreme oddity. Uytenbogaardt was one of the few architects of the 1970 s who were consciously seeking to combat the exclusionary policies of apartheid, which sought to remove people of colour from places of economic opportunity. A central idea behind the Werdmuller Centre was to create a souk for micro-businesses between the generator of the station and the Main Road. The building was explicitly challenging the exclusionary American model of big box shopping centres such as Cavendish Square. Dewar, Louw, Cultural & aesthetic The Werdmuller Centre is a prime example of a South African expression of the Modern Movement. It displays common aesthetic features of buildings of its era for example, off-shutter concrete, it is raised on pilotis, it has a roof garden, free plan, free façade. Internationally it is significant in that it represents a rare typology a shopping mall where the flowing ground-plane through the ramps are combined with the idea of a souk 1 as an idea of establishing a shopping centre, thus deliberately subverting the introverted box-like shopping malls which was and still is the norm in most cities. It is a building which establishes an urbanity by drawing in the public deep into the building and thus contributing spatially to the street similarly to what arcades would do in traditional parts of cities. 1 A souq (Arabic:,سوق also souk, esouk, suk, sooq, souq, or suq; technical transliteration sūq) is a commercial quarter in an Arab or Berber city. The term is often used to designate the market in any Arabized or Muslim city, but in modern times it appears in Western cities too. It may also refer to the weekly market in some smaller towns where neutrality from tribal conflicts would be declared to permit the exchange of surplus goods. In Modern Standard Arabic the term refers to markets in both the physical sense and the abstract economic sense (e.g., an Arab would speak of the souq in the old city as well as the souq for oil, and would call the concept of the free market الحر السوق as-sūq al-ḥurr). reviewed on 24 Jan 2011.

5 The use of off-shutter concrete for the entire building gives it an austerity associated with many buildings of the late 60 s and 70 s internationally the so-called brutalist movement. The Werdmuller Centre is a work by a recognised national and international master architect and urban designer. Locally he received the Gold medal award for Architecture and his design for Steinkopf Community Centre, in the Northern Cape, was published internationally as a leading example of late 20 th Century architecture. Roelof Uytenbogaardt was a keen follower of the design principles of Le Corbusier, Alvar Alto as well as Louis Kahn, the latter under whom he studied at the University of Pennsylvania, Philedelphia from Furthermore, Uytenbogaardt s work and teachings has influenced contemporary, particularly Cape Town architects. Many of his ex-students and followers of his work, Suzanne Hall, Barbara Southworth, Heinrich Wolff, have been able to successfully implement Uytenbogaardt s ideas and principles of architecture and urban design through their own work. His legacy is an integral part of Cape Town s architectural conscious. 4.4 Historical The Werdmuller Centre is a rare example nationally of a building using the tenets of Modernism in such a hybridised and expressive manner. With perhaps the exception of Adele and Tony Santos design for House Stekhoven, no other building of its era displays such a curvilinear tour de force using off-shutter concrete in the region of the Western Cape. Socially it is an important building of its time as it explicitly defied the harsh politics of separatism and pursued the principles of humanism and contextualisation. Internationally it is unique in that it represents an innovation or at least an experimentation in a typology that of commercial shopping centres. 4.5 General assessment The Werdmuller Centre is the work of a recognised master Roelof S Uytenbogaardt. The expressive use of concrete lends itself as a technical curiosity. It represents a democratic social ideal where all modes of transport are given equal consideration thereby making it a building for all income groups. This is a radical idea for a time where most buildings were design to follow apartheid s racist ideologies. It is in relatively good condition despite unsympathetic alterations done in the past as well as poor maintenance.

6 It holds iconic status amongst architects and urban designers in the Western Cape, at least. The building is not an easy building to adapt to commercial purposes like offices, apartments etc, considering the organisation of the plan, lack of parking, lack of security. Therefore its use will need to be that of a public nature. It would be well suited for cultural uses such as exhibitions, artists studios and public performance art. The ground floor could be completely given over to the public as trading space. d o _ c o _ m o _ m o _ International working party for documentation and conservation ISC/R members update 2003 of buildings, sites and neighbourhoods of the for office use only modern movement 5 Documentation 5.1 principal references Wolff, I, Werdmuller Center artefact of an ephemeral context, appears in the South African Journal of Art History Volume 24 (2009)

7 5.2 visual material attached Recent Photos 2009 Heinrich Wolff

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10 Original Photos circa 1976 UCT Manuscript and Archives Uytenbogaardt papers.

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13 Drawings Original Floor Plans Basement plan Lower ground floor plan Ground floor plan

14 5.3 rapporteur/date February Fiche report examination by ISC/R name of examining ISC member: date of examination: approval: working party/ref. n : NAI ref. n :