THE WERDMULLER CENTRE – Why did it really fail?

ILZE WOLFF - Partner in Open House Architecture and part-time lecturer at the School of Architecture Planning and Geomatics UCT, submits a paper presented to the South African Journal for Art History conference 2009 - 'Extraordinary Artifacts' - on the contextual reasons behind the failure of one of South Africa's most exemplary modernist buildings, Roeloff Uitenbogaardt's WERDMULLER CENTRE.


The Werdmuller Centre, an iconic modernist building designed by renowned South African architect, urbanist and teacher, Roelof Uytenbogaardt, is under threat of demolition. A questionable Heritage Impact Assessment done in December 2007, states that the main reason for the demolition of the defunct shopping mall is that it is financially impotent and therefore a liability for the owner.

The paper will trace the urban, economic and political contexts within which Uytenbogaardt and his colleagues conceived the design of the building. A design that quietly sought to reconnect displaced communities to the city within the oppressive political arena of the 1970’s; a design that sought to prioritise the needs of the pedestrian thereby serving the needs of the lowest income groups; and a design that investigated a more social approach to shopping in the conception of an open market or souk.

The Werdmuller Centre was also conceived within the context of urban proposals that have not materialised as originally planned, for example the Claremont Boulevard, a highway that is present in Uytenbogaardt’s earliest conceptual sketches. The design hinged on the premise that its context within Claremont would become progressively geared towards a broad based use of public transport – whereas today, the opposite is in fact the reality.

The paper will attempt to unpack these and other ‘imaginary’, ghost and unrealised contexts within which the building was conceived and built.

In 1969 Roelof S. Uytenbogaardt presented a proposal for a department store and apartments to his client, the South African Mutual Life Assurance Society – now Old Mutual. The site earmarked for the development was in Claremont, Cape Town between Newry and Ralph streets.

In this document, Uytenbogaardt writes that the site for this proposed development offers many features that would make a commercial development highly feasible.

The site is situated at the fulcrum of four major transport opportunities – a busy main road to the west, the historic railway line and station to the east, a bus terminus and taxi rank to the south and a generous parking area to the north (Figure 6).

At the time two new roads – the Claremont by- pass to the east of the site and a road linking Bowwood and Protea to the west – were in the pipeline that would further contribute to the diverse mix of public and private; local and urban transport systems.

Furthermore, Uytenbogaardt claims, the site is already in the centre of a 90-year old business and commercial environment, serving what he calls: “a hinterland’ of a well mixed community ranging from high income through to middle and low.” [1]

Unfortunately the Werdmuller Centre, as the development became known, has never thrived as a commercial venture despite being so strategically positioned within a whirlwind of sources of foot traffic with the potential to purchase. It is for this reason that in 2006-7 the owners, Old Mutual Properties, sought a demolition permit for the building.

This paper will try and uncover the reasons why the Werdmuller Centre failed commercially by examining the urban, economic and political contexts within which the development was conceived and built. It is my contention that the economic failure of the Werdmuller Center cannot be solely blamed on the design of the building as has been done in a recent Heritage Statement. [2] The shifting socio-economic, political and urban milieu within which Uytenbogaardt and his colleagues found themselves at the time had a major influence on what the Werdmuller centre has become today.

PROJECT BACKGROUND

The design intention of the Werdmuller Centre was to revitalize the east part of the main road which was under threat of becoming blight. This was in contrast to the west side of the main road which was becoming more and more gentrified. Uytenbogaardt and his colleagues’ [3] design intentions were to create a shopping environment that was an alternative to the North American model of the air-conditioned box accessed predominantly by car. The Werdmuller centre was an externalised building that sought to pick up views of the mountain (Figure 4) and to draw on the existing pedestrian traffic flows to and from the main road and the station (Figure 3).

Programmatically, the idea was to designate one extended space that would accommodate a large market or souk, as opposed to a building with many individual shops. The subtext to this idea was to offer trade opportunities to non-white traders who at the time were not allowed to trade freely in the city. In turn the proposed shopping model would then also aid in combating the rising unemployment rates by stimulating a micro economy.

In addition to the building’s strong social agenda, it also exuded a rare confidence in the art of architecture and expressive form making.

Unlike the UCT Sport Centre, the building was incredibly well received at the time in the local papers. One John Benzon wrote in the Cape Times of 21 November 1975, that the building was the “best things that has happened to Claremont both commercially and architecturally”, and ‘Werdmuller is designed for interest and beauty throughout”.[4]

Its praises were short-lived, however, and the building soon fell victim to its client’s profit-making incentives who at the time also developed Cavendish Square, a conventional shopping centre on the west and on the ‘right’ side of the main road.

After the completion of the building, the spaces that were tailored to suit the concept of a micro market were altered to suit a more conventional mall typology with bigger, more defined shops.

Over the years further alterations were done in continuing attempts to attract suitable tenants and finally in 2006 Old Mutual Properties applied for a demolition permit.

The impending demolition of the building caused an unprecedented outcry of dissent from mainly the architectural fraternity as well as from various members of the public concerned with modern heritage. What stood out for me in many of the public discussions and debates that were held, is not the love of the formal dexterity of the building but what the building symbolized as an expression of a new and utopian urban possibility.

URBAN CONTEXT

As much as the building responded to its existing context, there was always an ambivalent sense that it was planned for a future context as well as an eroded context.

As an urban structure it is important to look at the building from a broader urban design perspective. Claremont was at the time, and still is today, undergoing a major urban transformation. During the 1960s and 70s the city had many grand development schemes on the table and Uytenbogaardt not only took cognisance of these future developments but utilised them as design constraints and informants for the Werdmuller Centre. Evidence of this is the fact that he included a drawing of the Claremont By-pass that was published in the Cape Times in 1969, in his design proposal that was submitted to the client (Figure 2). Even the early concept sketches (Figure 5) include the Claremont By-pass in its elevated form albeit with a question mark hovering above it. How was he to know that a year after the Werdmuller Centre was completed, the City would to publish its City Councils Claremont Report of 1976 [5] (Figure 7), in which amongst other major changes, the Claremont By-pass was to be implemented at-grade and not elevated as previously planned?

The same report also proposed a building, which included a library, on the site previously dedicated to public parking, north of Newry Street. Because the Werdmuller Centre depended on the “generous public parking area to the north” [6] as described in the design proposal, it did not see the need to provide more parking within the envelope of the building, other than the 23 bays that would service the apartments. However, this new 1976 plan seriously undermined the Werdmuller Centre’s viability from a parking point of view.

A further negative spin-off for the Werdmuller Centre was that, the new amended design for the Claremont By-pass – at grade and not elevated - threatened to disrupt the natural flow of pedestrians from the station to the main road, a principle on which the design of the Werdmuller Centre was hinged upon.

From the early concept drawing of the Werdmuller Centre one can surmise that Uytenbogaardt was not only informed but also inspired by this proposed elevated concourse and thought that it together with the building could create a dramatic urban-architectural moment.

The form of the building was directly informed by the proposed elevated highway because in the top half the offices are deeply set back behind concrete screens that form green balconies. These screens would have the added function as a sound barrier against the By-pass which would be more or less at that level. The bottom half, on the other hand, has a much more delicate and transparent design, with double volume shopfronts boldly displaying goods to pedestrians coming from the station.

SHIFTS IN TRANSPORTATION POLICY

Much of the design of the Werdmuller Centre was informed by a well organized, integrated and diverse range of modes of transport. However, it is important to note that between the time that the Werdmuller Centre was planned (circa 1965-69) and its actual construction (1970-75) the City’s transportation policies would undergo major shifts.

Public transport in Cape Town has grown exponentially from the turn of the 19th century until 1950 when it was at its peak. As Ron Kingma explains [8] , the public transport system has flourished from the seed that it was 1801, when the first horse drawn passenger carrying service from Cape Town to Simon’s Town was implemented, until the late 1950-60’s, when a rich network of bus, trams and rail transportation existed (Figure 8).

Claremont’s development as a shopping district was a direct consequence of this growing public transport system. According to Kingma, by 1960 200 million bus passengers were being transported every year on a fleet of 600 buses and 139 trackless trams and traveling 43 million km per year. The railway was as in demand, carrying 100 million rail passengers per year. The private car was in the minority.

However the mid 1960’s saw a major re-evaluation of public transportation values and a move towards private car travel (Figure 9). Kingma cites that there was a “sudden aspiration to braaivleis, sunny skies, drive-in and Chevrolet” (Kingma 2004: 440) and because of this demand of the private car, the authorities began to adopt the North American transportation model geared towards prioritising the urban use of the private car, and it concomitant demands on urban planning.

This era saw the construction and planning of highways, road widenings and narrowing of footpaths and covering up of tramlines. Instead of the motorcar becoming an added feature in the transport landscape/network of the city, it really became the dominant order, thereby all but obliterating previous networks of transportation.

Kingma further explains that after 150 years of exponential growth in the public transport industry, bus patronage started to decline. By 1970 bus patronage dropped by 120 million per annum. Buses were literally marginalized to the sides of the road and private cars continually sought to ‘drive out‘ buses as they were considered to cause traffic delays. Furthermore the impact of the Group Areas Act and the racial segregation of passengers further impacted on the economic viability of buses and government subsidies were introduced for the first time.

The deregulation of the minibus taxi industry in the 1980’s further hampered the viability of buses. The taxis introduced fierce competition. Traffic congestion and slower traveling speed of buses attracted commuters to taxis rather than buses.

As one can imagine, these major shifts again impacted on the viability of the Werdmuller Centre because the Werdmuller Centre catered for a public transport environment where all modes of transport enjoyed more or less equal status. One can say that the Werdmuller Centre was conceived, planned and designed in an era where public transport was relatively utopian but was constructed in an era that suddenly saw other social values in place. The dominance of the private motor vehicle inevitably led to the neglect of services to the poor who were unable to afford the expense of a car.

Kingma states (Kingma 2004: 442) that private car ownership increased from 10% of the population in 1960 to 24% of the population in 1980. But interestingly, between 1980 and 2004 the private car ownership % has remained static at 24% even though the population has trebled. This is largely due to the fact that the city has seen a vast increase in poor people moving to the city from surrounding rural areas in search of employment and better economic conditions. Because most of these poor people cannot afford cars they are dependent on a public transport system that has been neglected by city authorities since the 1960s. Currently there is a renewed interest in providing proper public transport in the form of the implementation of policies such as the National Land Transport Transition Act. Perhaps the authorities will recognize that the Werdmuller Centre’s original intentions were not so far-fetched and utopian.

SOCIO-POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC CONTEXT

In the 1969 proposal, Uytenbogaardt refers to serving “a hinterland of a well mixed community ranging from high income through to middle and low.” [8] What or who was Uytenbogaardt referring to? If one considers the political setting of the time, one can only deduce that he was referring to, on a broad scale, the thousands of displaced families on the Cape Flats affected by forced removals, and on a local Claremont scale, to a cosmopolitan mix of people from different economic and racial groupings.

The proposal was submitted and possibly accepted by February 1969 but by November 1969 Claremont was declared a whites only area under the Group Areas Act. Evictions and removals started early in 1970 mostly from an area previously known as lower Claremont and today called Harfield Village. It was a popular area in which to reside because it provided the mostly working- class inhabitants easy access to the cheap network of public transport (as already described), therefore access to work and economic opportunities. In addition the lower Claremont area had also developed into a self-sufficient area with many people running shops (Figure 10) and family businesses with some family businesses dating back to the turn of the 20th century. [9]

Claremont as a whole was always seen as a major shopping district and as Joyce Murray describes in 1958 in her book ‘Claremont Album’ (Murray 1958:63):

Claremont preens itself when outsiders praise its wonderful shopping Centre.
But the people who live in Claremont have their own special shops, often
not the big showy stores with huge shop-windows but little places tucked
away down a side street, recommended perhaps by a neighbour who has dealt
there for years.

Murray goes on to describe how (Murray 1958:64):

outsiders complain that the population of Claremont is ‘so mixed’ not
stopping to think how much the character of the Village owes to this
variety. The different races have learnt to live together here in a civilized
fashion: there is room for all in this Market Place. There is no Colour
Bar in the shops, and no one is scowled at or jostled off the pavement
because of the colour of their skin.

Little was she to know that this idyllic, tolerant existence would be completely disrupted less than ten years later with the introduction and implementation of the Group Areas Act.

But what impact did the forced removals of an estimated 19000 people have on the Werdmuller Centre? For one it reduced the number of foot traffic to the centre because not only is there is decrease in the Claremont population but also a decrease in visitors to Claremont. Secondly, the Werdmuller Centre’s idea of catering for a micro economy and small scale traders could not happen because that part of the population is not there anymore!

Conversely, a more up-market shopping centre like Cavendish Square thrived partly due to the influx of the more affluent whites moving into Claremont. Old Mutual Properties tried unsuccessfully to market (Figure 11) the Werdmuller Centre to a more up-market clientele, but could not meet their demands such as in house parking, a completely artificial environment and most importantly, security.

It is worth mentioning that the context within which Uytenbogaardt worked with his client was also a moving target. Soon after the first design proposal (known as LHC 1) was complete, Old Mutual acquired additional adjacent and required of Uytenbogaardt to incorporate the new acquisition without going through the expense of total redesign.

CONCLUSION

Today, 40 years after the proposal for the Werdmuller centre was submitted, with all its utopian ideals and strong social agenda, stands what Giovanni Vio in his book on the work of Uytenbogaardt calls an “urban wreck” (Vio 2006: 71).

It remains constant within an ephemeral urban, economic and political context. It is a constant reminder of a society where the values are still to serve the rich and not the poor.

Perhaps a way forward for the Werdmuller Centre is to critically analyze the present situation in terms of urban planning, socio-economic and political contexts in order revive the building and prevent it from becoming a mere artifact of unforgiving and shifting contexts.

This paper will appear in the next issue of the South African Art History Journal.

IMAGE REFERENCES

Intro GIF sequence - Gaelin Pinnock (1st image) & UCT Manuscripts & Archives - balance.

Figure 1
Cape Times 21 November 1975,
UCT Manuscripts and Archives,
Roelof Uytenbogaardt Papers, BC 1264, H-
Projects

Figure 2
Drawing that was included in undated feasibility study LHC 2.
UCT Manuscripts and Archives,
Roelof Uytenbogaardt Papers, BC 1264, H-
Projects

Figure 3
Werdmuller Centre shortly after opening in 1975-6
UCT Manuscripts and Archives,
Roelof Uytenbogaardt Papers, BC 1264, J -
Photographs, J4.9.2

Figure 4
Werdmuller Centre shortly after opening in 1975-6
UCT Manuscripts and Archives,
Roelof Uytenbogaardt Papers, BC 1264, J -
Photographs, J4.9.2

Figure 5
Conceptual sketch showing the elevated Claremont Boulevard on the right.
UCT Manuscripts and Archives,
Roelof Uytenbogaardt Papers.

Figure 6
Drawing that was included in undated feasibility study LHC 2.
UCT Manuscripts and Archives,
Roelof Uytenbogaardt Papers, BC 1264, H-
Projects

Figure 7
Drawing from the City Councils Claremont Report of 1976
Scanned from Erasmus 1981:11

Figure 8
Claremont Main Road circa 1800.
Scanned from S Field (ed) 2001:102

Figure 9
Claremont Main Road circa 1960.
UCT Manuscripts and Archives,
Roelof Uytenbogaardt Papers, BC 1264, J -
Photographs, J4.9.2

Figure 10
Shopkeeper in Lower Claremont circa 1970.
Scanned from S Field (ed) 2001:102

Figure 11
Advertisement for the Werdmuller Center circa 1970.
Cape Times 21 November 1975,
UCT Manuscripts and Archives,
Roelof Uytenbogaardt Papers, BC 1264, H-
Projects


NOTES/REFERENCES


1 Quote taken from an undated feasibility study named L.H.C 2 compiled by the office of Roelof Uytenbogaardt accessed from UCT Manuscripts and Archives, Roelof Uytenbogaardt Papers, BC 1264, H- Projects.

2 See Draft Heritage Statement compiled by Peter de Tolly & Associates, Aikman & Associates and Urban Design Services, December 2007. http://werdmullercentre.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2007-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&updated-max=2008-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=8 reviewed on March 12 2009

3 Besides for the two feasibility studies (one undated and one dated February 1969) further design intentions as discussed amongst the professional team were never documented. This comes from an interview in February 2009 with Prof Dave Dewar, long time UCT colleague of Uytenbogaardt.

4 See John Benzon, Cape Times 21 November 1975, UCT Manuscripts and Archives,Roelof Uytenbogaardt Papers, BC 1264, H-Projects.

5 An extract of the report is found in Erasmus,Peter, 1981, A Pedestrianised Commercial Complex, UCT B Arch Thesis.

6 See note 1.

7 Kingma, Ron ‘Public Transport: A new planning paradigm is required to succeed’ available on
https://www.up.ac.za/dspace/bitstream/2263/5726/1/Kingma_Public(2004).pdf reviewed on 31 March 2009

8 See note 1.

9. A full description and oral history of lower Claremont as it was before the forced removals is found in Sean Field (ed) 2001 ‘Lost Communities, living memories – Remembering forced removals in Cape Town’ David Phillip Publishers.


WORKS CITED

Erasmus, Peter 1981 A Pedestrianised
Commercial Complex, unpublished
UCT B.Arch Thesis.

Field Sean (ed) 2001 Lost
Communities, living memories –
Remembering forced removals
in Cape Town, David Phillip
Publishers.

Kingma, Ron, 2004, ‘Public
Transport: A new planning
paradigm is required to
succeed’available on
https://www.up.ac.za/dspace/bitstream2263/5726/1/Kingma_Public(2004).pdf reviewed on 31 March 2009


Murray, J, 1958, Claremont Album,
A.A Balkema

Swanson, Feliciy ‘Mense van die Vlak’
Community and Forced removals in
Lower Claremont, in Sean Field
(ed) 2001 Lost Communities, living
memories – Remembering forced
removals in Cape Town, David
Phillip Publishers.

Vio, Giovanni, ‘Timeless’ Il Poligrafo,
2006


Ilze Wolff is a UCT Architecture graduate and has been practicing within the field of design and architectural conservation. She is a partner in the architectural practice Open House Architecture and has taught design on a part-time basis at the UCT School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics. Although the practice’s main focus is design, OH A is also involved in stimulating debate around architecture by organizing Open House Tours – guided tours of buildings concentrated around topics such as housing, luxury living, or architectural monographs such as that of the late Bauhaus architect, Pius Pahl.

See also www.oharchitecture.com