Architecture
From the 17th-century Castle of Good Hope to the 21st-century towers rising on the Foreshore, Cape Town’s range of architecture is one of its most attractive features. Much that might have been destroyed in other places has been preserved and can be viewed on walking or cycling tours of the city and surroundings.
Dutch Colonial
When the Dutch colonists arrived in 1652, they brought their European ideas of architecture with them, but had to adapt to local conditions and available materials. There was plenty of stone on hand from Table Mountain to build the Castle of Good Hope between 1666 and 1679. The first Capetonian houses were utilitarian structures, such as the thatched and whitewashed Posthuys in Muizenberg, dating from 1673. This simple rustic style of building is one that you’ll still find today along the Western Cape coast.
Governor Simon van der Stel’s quintessential manor house, Groot Constantia, went up in 1692, setting a precedent for other glorious estates to follow further inland in the Winelands. On Strand St, the fancy facade of the late 18th-century Koopmans-de Wet House is attributed to Louis Thibault, who, as lieutenant of engineers for the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie; VOC), was responsible for the design of most of Cape Town’s public buildings in this period. Thibault also had a hand in the handsome Rust en Vreugd: completed in 1778, the house is notable for its delicately carved rococo fanlight above the main door, as well as its double balconies and portico.
Of course, not everyone lived in such a grand manner. In the city centre, the best place to get an idea of how Cape Town looked to ordinary folk during the 18th century is to take a stroll through the Bo-Kaap. You’ll notice flat roofs instead of gables and a lack of shutters on the windows, all the result of VOC building regulations.
British Colonial
When the British took over from the Dutch in the early 19th century, they had their own ways of doing things, and this extended to the architectural look of the city. British governor Lord Charles Somerset made the biggest impact during his 1814–26 tenure. It was he who ordered the restyling of De Tuynhuis – first built as a guesthouse and later a summer residence for the Dutch governors of the Cape – to bring it into line with Regency tastes for verandahs and front gardens, and renamed it Government House.
As the British Empire reached its zenith in the late 19th century, Cape Town boomed and a slew of monumental buildings were erected. Walk down Adderley St and through the Company’s Gardens and you’ll pass many, including the Standard Bank building, with its pediment, dome and soaring columns; the Houses of Parliament; and the Byzantine-influenced Old Synagogue, dating from 1863. The neighbouring and neo-Egyptian-styled Great Synagogue, with its twin towers, is from 1905. Long St is where you can see Victorian Cape Town at its most appealing, with the wrought-iron balconies and varying facades of shops and buildings.
Another building boom in the 1920s and '30s led to the construction of many fine art deco buildings in the city centre. Prime examples include the blocks around Greenmarket Sq and the handsome 1939 Mutual Heights building – the continent’s first skyscraper – decorated with friezes and frescoes, all with South African themes.
Sir Herbert Baker
Like his patron Cecil Rhodes, Herbert Baker (1862–1946) was an ambitious young Englishman who seized the chance to make his mark in South Africa. Baker arrived in Cape Town in 1892 and a year later, through family connections, had gained himself an audience with Rhodes and been commissioned to remodel Groote Schuur, the prime minister’s mansion on the slopes of Table Mountain. This kicked off a style known as Cape Dutch Revival.
Many more commissions followed, and Cape Town is littered with buildings of Baker’s design, including several cottages in Muizenberg (where Baker lived for a while), St George’s Cathedral and the First National Bank on Adderley St. In 1900, Rhodes sent Baker to Italy, Greece and Egypt to study their classical architecture to inspire him to design the sort of grand buildings Rhodes wished to see constructed in South Africa. Two years later, though, Rhodes was dead – and Baker was designing his memorial.
Among Baker’s grandest work is the imposing Union Buildings in Pretoria (1909). In 1912 he left South Africa to join Edwin Lutyens in designing the secretariat buildings in New Delhi. Back in the UK, he worked on South Africa House in London’s Trafalgar Sq, and was knighted in 1926. He’s buried in Westminster Abbey.
Township Architecture
From the early 1920s out on the empty, sandy Cape Flats, homes were being built for the coloured and black labourers. Langa was established in 1927 and is South Africa’s oldest planned township; today it’s home to 250,000 people – the same number who live in the city centre, but squashed into a suburb some 48 times smaller.
Although shacks (properly called ‘informal settlements’) are the constructions most widely associated with the townships, this is far from the only architecture in these areas; the buildings you’ll find can be broken into five main categories.
Shacks
It’s estimated that there are around one million people living in self-built shacks. Cobbled together from a variety of materials, such as old packing crates, and decorated with (among other things) magazine pages and old food-tin labels, the design and structure of a shack depends on the financial situation of the owner and how long they have lived there.
Hostels
Built originally for migrant labourers before WWII, these two-level brick dormitories were broken up into basic units, each accommodating 16 men, who shared one shower, one toilet and one small kitchen. Tiny bedrooms housed up to three men each. After the Pass laws (which stated that those without a job outside the homelands were not allowed to leave) were abolished, most men brought their families to live with them. Each unit became home to up to 16 families, with each room sleeping up to three families. Although some families still live in such conditions, other hostels have been modernised to provide less cramped and much more habitable apartments.
Terrace Houses
In the older townships of Langa and Gugulethu you’ll come across one-storey terrace housing built between the 1920s and '40s. Like the hostels, conditions in these 30-sq-metre ‘railway carriage’ houses were very basic and crowded. Since the end of apartheid these houses have been owned by the former tenants, who are now responsible for their maintenance. Residents have sometimes expanded them (when possible) into the front and back yards.
Social Housing
Since 1994, the South African government has striven to build proper houses in the townships, first through the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and currently through the Breaking New Ground (BNG) scheme, both of which provide a very basic, free house to former shack residents. Averaging around 28 sq metres in size, these ‘matchbox’ houses are little more than four concrete-block walls topped with a roof of corrugated iron. There's no insulation, ceilings or hot water provided.
So called 'gap' housing is also being built in the townships for low-income families who earn between R3500 and R10,000 a month. Residents are expected to contribute towards buying these subsidised homes, which are typically of a better quality than BNG housing.
Township Villas
There are areas of Gugulethu, Langa and Khayelitsha that are very middle-class, and where you’ll find spacious, bungalow-style houses and villas of a high standard.
Apartheid Era
The election of the National Party to government in 1948 was bad news for Cape Town’s architecture in more ways than one. Apartheid laws labelled Cape Town a mainly coloured city – this meant that the national government was unwilling to support big construction projects (hampering the development of the Foreshore for decades), while the local authorities went about applying the Group Areas Act, demolishing areas such as District Six and rezoning Green Point (including De Waterkant) as a whites-only area.
Examples of rationalist architecture from this era include the hideous Artscape arts centre and the adjoining Civic Centre on the Foreshore, which demonstrate the obsession with concrete that was typical of international modernism. Such poor design wasn’t necessarily a function of apartheid planning, as the Baxter Theatre proves. Designed by Jack Barnett, its flat roof is famously dimpled with orange fibreglass downlights that glow fabulously at night. Also notable is the striking Taal Monument in Paarl, with a 57m-concrete tower designed by Jan van Wijk.
The lack of planning or official architectural concern for the townships has long been criticised, although it is worth mentioning the tremendous ingenuity and resilience that residents have shown in creating liveable homes from scrap. A visit to the townships today reveals colourfully painted shacks and murals, homes and churches made from shipping crates, and more recent imaginative structures, such as the Guga S’Thebe Arts & Cultural Centre in Langa.
Contemporary Architecture
The death knell of apartheid coincided with the redevelopment of the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront in the early 1990s. More recent architectural additions to the Waterfront include the Nelson Mandela Gateway and Clock Tower Precinct, built in 2001 as the new departure point for Robben Island, and the ritzy millionaire’s playground of the V&A Marina, with some 600 apartments and 200 boat moorings.
The recent Cape Town property boom has created an environment for some interesting new residential buildings and conversions of old office blocks into apartments, such as the Mutual Heights building, the three old buildings that are part of Mandela Rhodes Place, and the adjacent Taj Cape Town hotel, all of which sensitively combine the original structures with new towers.
Opening in 2003, the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC), with its ship-like prow and sleek glass-and-steel hotel, drew favourable nods and has helped push the City Bowl down towards the waterfront, from which it had been cut off for decades. An extension to the CTICC is currently rising across Heerengracht. In late 2014, the city announced plans to extend the commercially successful Waterfront area along the Foreshore, with a new cruise liner terminal, housing, commercial buildings and landscaped public space.
At the end of 2014 the new theatre at Guga S’thebe Cultural Centre in Langa was opened. An innovative collaboration between the city's Department of Arts and Culture and architectural students from faculties in Cape Town, Germany and the USA, it was constructed using recycled materials, including shipping crates, straw, and wood from fruit crates. All eyes will be on the Waterfront in 2017, when the new art museum Zeitz MOCAA, designed by Thomas Heatherwick to use the old grain silos there, is set to open.