27.05.2017

Hidden Johannesburg, as found inside by Paul Duncan and Alain Proust

Hidden Johannesburg, as found inside by Paul Duncan and Alain Proust. Order at www.namibiana.de

Hidden Johannesburg, as found inside by Paul Duncan and Alain Proust. Order at www.namibiana.de

There's that constant question asked more out of curiosity than from any particular concern: what does the inside look like? Paul Duncan's and Alain Proust's great photo book is the answer to such question, introducing to spheres of hidden places in Johannesburg.

There is always way more to see when you explore a city on foot, keeping to the pavements, crossing its streets from side to side, and making detours to catch a glimpse of something overlooked previously, or to take a short cut. Suddenly you become aware of looming facades, their adornments, the detail, door cases and windows, roofscapes, symmetry scale, monumentality light and shade - in fact, all those things that give buildings their presence and underpin their contexts and their place in the world. And there's that constant question asked more out of curiosity than from any particular concern: what does the inside look like? If there's an interesting fagade there's probably an even more fascinating interior. And if the exterior is intact, what's happened inside? What's the story behind how this particular building came to stand here and play a role in a city plonked down and grown like some hybrid maverick in the hot African veld? Johannesburg - old Johannesburg - is no exception to any of this. It may be difficult now to be a pedestrian (try it though; I did) in the CBD and the old suburbs nearby like Hillbrow or Doornfontein, other than on an organized tour, but in other places - Newtown for example, and lately Braamfontein - there's been a revival of cultural and mercantile life leading to a revitalizing of neighbourhoods and an almost dizzying injection of activity that's woken them from near-death experiences. But Johannesburg is a city that only truly reveals itself when you look upwards - on the outside anyway Not only are there plenty of magisterial fagades festooned with a wealth of detail, much of it preserved because it's out of reach, but also there, writ large, is a plausible visual microcosm of Western architecture between the two last decades of the nineteenth century and those at the middle of the twentieth. Much of it apes its peers in sophisticated, fashionable European metropolises like London or Berlin or Paris, or American cities like New York or Chicago. That such a new city was able to do this so quickly hints at its resources both financial and physical. They had the cash to do it, and the spacious land. Look at the Rand Club: a puffed-up building with three different street fagades, on a site where, not 20 years before it was built, there had been just open veld. Much of early Johannesburg, including the Rand Club, went through successive waves of building construction as the earliest wooden shacks and corrugated iron-roofed shanties were transformed into more permanent, two- or three-storey brick-and-mortar structures with cast-iron verandahs templated out of a catalogue in the Victorian style, only to be replaced by statelier buildings that, indicating a mature city at full throttle, ran the gamut of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century architectural styles from fin de siecle to beaux arts, Arts and Crafts to neoclassical, designed by architects who had distinguished themselves either in Cape Town or in the offices of well-known, even famous, British practices. Most often, and from the close of the Anglo-Boer War, Johannesburg's buildings are an architectural representation of British imperial hegemony; City Hall for example, or the buildings of Herbert Baker that today seem to be extraordinarily non-indigenous white elephants in territories far from home. Baker's picturesque 'country houses', like Northwards and Glenshiel, spring to mind, until you look closely and notice that they respond to their environments both functionally and respectfully And sometimes, here and there, you stumble on a building that's transitional; not yet distanced enough from that 'old world' and still tentatively embracing a new global language, like Gordon Leith's Freemason's Hall. Now and again there are buildings that are in tune with, even herald, a brave new world and are revolutionary; Leek & Emley's Corner House is the best example of this.

Hidden Johannesburg. Author: Paul Duncan, Photographer: Alain Proust. ISBN 9781770079922 / ISBN 978-1-77007-992-2

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