The Keyes Art Mile, Rosebank

I along with Ryan have 5 reasons as to why running launched itself off of a low base of worn out luminous Polly Shortts, torn, old sweat stained t-shirts, waffled flat trainers, Casio stop-watches and Bar-ones to become a phenomenal craze in which all of a sudden no one asks, ‘but what about the damage to your knees?’

We created our list as we harpooned our way through Jacaranda Jo-burg. Our list in no particular order:

The GPS watch. The watch which at the outset tended to be the size of a washing machine thrust one-self into tracking one’s own performance. The runner could document every run, it’s distance, it’s time and it’s speed. SPEED.And with that one could evaluate performance and improve on ability. Today it’s not uncommon for table talk to include the, ‘so, what pace you running?’ question. 

Nike. By creating a running shoe that didn’t look like a platform, that expressed colours prominent in an LSD trip, and that looked good both as you flexed your calves in the vegetable section of Woolworths and on the tar, an attraction between running and street cred was created.

Lycra. Sweet Mary Jane, Lycra. From its heady days in the 80’s when big hair, leg warmers, Jane Fonda and VHS died, Lycra has had a somewhat religious resurrection. Today, typically called leggings, women have adopted them like white on rice. They’re loved and adored for their form hugging properties, for the bragging rights afforded one should you look like a stealth missile wearing them, and for their comfort factor. Some women can wear them, and others are driven to wear them. Given our woke generation, even guys are known to romp around town in a pair, though apart from Kipchoge, they shouldn’t be worn by guys. It’s borderline blasphemy.

A late comer to the list has to include, Strava. This is the Facebook of running. If your run ain’t on Strava, it pretty much didn’t happen. 

 

And so running evolved from amoeba, to tadpole, to grizzly-bear-backed-barefooted guy, to Woolies hot chick.

On every other Thursday I’d clock out of the office and head to an art gallery. 

I was lured by the artwork, I was lured by the crowd and ofcourse I was lured by the open bar.

I loved it. I’d ask my mates to join and they never would. ‘sorry chaito, I’m at gym spinning’, or  ‘call me when you’re done scouring art’, and once, having taken a girl on a date to the gallery,  after about 18 minutes she said ‘take me home……NOW’

Art galleries weren’t cool. Even free tipple couldn’t attract a crowd. 

And then came the evolution of art gallery, the rebirth of cool, the serrated, truncated aeroplane wing of a building that sits on the corner of Jellicoe and Jan Smuts Ave high on its elevated perch. The Circa art gallery.

The Circa formed the iconic catalyst of the Keyes Art Mile. The Keyes Art Mile is a superlative stab at urban planning on a small scale. As one hops and skips along it’s spine, tasty Hansie and Grietjie crumbs - the green, soft-to-the touch, buoyant, blossoming St Teresa’s parking lot, the ever steady Everard Read Gallery , The Trumpet and Circa gallery-dot the street. All waiting to be devoured by passers-by as a ravenous intermittent faster.  

The Circa gallery is a simple building, perfectly executed, beautifully located.

It’s a solid, mottled, oval form making a powerful statement deflecting ones pre-conceived notion of what a building ought to look like. Even its internal experience is unfamiliar. It’s corkscrew stair sweeps its way up to the midriff where the main exhibition space sits continuing further onto the roof-scape where masterful views of a setting sun await.

The Trumpet is scintillating, people-centric architecture. The ground floor is wholly dedicated to street culture, to people interaction and seamless movement. One floor up and the double volume exhibition and fine retail space are a popped shaken soda of excitement.

The Everard Read Gallery plays its role as a further player in this interactive video game. It is a good space. It harboured at different times some of my most favoured local artists and it was here that I invested in one of my first pieces. The gallery is a meandering maze of different rooms, levels and displays. It’s size and configuration-not too small, not too big, but Goldilocksian ‘just right’ allowed me much time to drift, drink and dabble.

With these spirited efforts dressed each in their own unique garb lining the drag, they are in-fact presenting  the street as the architecture, the place for play. The buildings become the theatrical backdrop in which social interactions, pleasant strolls, seats to sit or bacchanalian frivolities are to be played out. 

Though First Thursdays destroyed my special place, the galleries spill out a-gush with both artoes, winoes and hipster o’s mingling over street cart food, beverages and chin wags. The cascading stairs offered by the Trumpet become Joburg’s Spanish Steps, dripping with star spangled revellers, Doc Martin goths and plaid pretenders. 

The natural interaction of the buildings and the landscaping offer all that Sohosian streets deliver to the people of London. I know. I’ve imbibed the spirit there.

The cobbly road and the rough crushed river stone’s are an aural experience. The pre-historic, giant rocks are seats and car crash barriers adding an earthy palette to a grey scape. The Mile shuns the vehicle for paving and wild and untethered flower beds anchored by skeletal trees skinned in flaking bark. And the smooth textured larger-than-me Eduardo Villa’s educate the First Thursday boozing masses. These elements/ ingredients ‘reduce’ the street width becoming the lacing binding, weaving the buildings either side of the street together like a tethered corset embracing a buxom bust.

All components in creating an architecture for people.

Apart from Melrose Arch, pre-planned, implemented urban schemes are few and far between in our town. They demand a long term vision, they demand buy-in from a number of stakeholders and they demand big loot. It’s visionary-Elon-Musk-kind-of stuff. But if you look closely you’ll see this small experiment being amoebic in Rosebank.

The Marc on Rivonia Road

I remember I went with Mikey to Sodwana. He went to dive and I simply went to get beach sand in my swimming trunks.

I remembered you could buy one of these giant pineapples on the side of the road.  The owner of the stall, using a machete fit for killing gorillas, would chop off the geometric, prickly skin with a number of violently deathly blows, and with the final swoosh, decapitating the poor fruit, sending its crown plummeting to the earth, discarded to reveal a golden yellow, Tonya Harding-tangy, sweet as gsus fruit. As the origami-looking effort was handed to me to be sucked, licked, bitten and devoured, I raised it in awe like Simba, and there by the light of the G-d-given golden orb, it glistened in the north eastern sunshine.

Every day as I missile down the M1 hurtling south I get a glimpse of the sparkling Marc reflecting the radiance of the setting sun, sitting hugged as a crown jewel in its perch on the periphery of the Sandton CBD, and I recall licking pineapples during those lazy days in Sods.

It certainly demands a moment of rubber necking for its an unusual shape in unusual colours. There is no doubt, it intrigued me, it intrigued others.

The Marc now sits where the legendary Village Walk mall once sat.
Village Walk was an innovative mall In that one could walk directly off the street into the mall. It was open to pedestrians with limited barriers to entrance. It had the Blues Room where I saw Barney Simon, it had a workable pseudo Italian street scene offering coffee shops, eateries, Sweets For/From Heaven and volumes of air and space. But what I remember most distinctly, was that when I was in standard 8 or 9, we started to go out on the jol, well I was a bit of a late bloomer, so it was really then when other kids were doing lines of coke off of toilet seats I was innocently listening to Dave Matthews albums on a cd player in my batman pj's. The point being it offered nightlife, it offered hailing cabs, it offered a "trevi-like' fountain which we sat upon and tossed coppers into, and it offered a relationship between inside and out.

For whatever reason the legendary Village Walk where we hung out as school kids was demolished to give way to The Marc.

As the concrete core climbed and the skew columns splayed like a stray rod in a game of pick-up-sticks my expectations were high. The raw structure of the building was a thing of aesthetics, it was an expression of beauty.
Lipsticked and mascara'd, the structure polished has taken on it's Faberge-type look. Its shiny, its glossy-mag ready, its enticing. But is it my kinda good architecture?

The plaza-like space in-front of the Pineapple on Rivonia road is deep and roomy. It's textured cobbled paving, the sculptural piece of landscape art , and the soft green landscaping to cools things off, offer a distinctive human scale to the building complex. The gentle rise to the Seattle Coffee too gives a living-in-Manhatten-coffee-sipping-in-a-wee-bodega effect. These, created as an engagement with the public. An interface that’s appealing.

Maude street is unique in the Sandton CBD context. It's narrow like a rabbits warren. Buildings tower on each side of the road, leaning in like Sheryl Sandbergh. and there is an attempt at on-grade retail.

Given the Maude slope, either side of the road is still defensive with The Marc's retail bunkered below ground and Nedbank's raised on high. It's not pretty, but, it'll work. which reminds me of a story.

I played golf as a junior and I made it into our club's handicap league. Handicap league consisted of players with handicaps from say 3 and upwards. Our teams worst handicap was about an 8. I got into the team as an 18.I wasn't there as a future prospect, I was there to win dirty. Sunday arrived for my debut league match. Typically the worst handicapped pair would fire up the tee box first. Around the tee box as I stepped up to my ball were my teammates,7 of them, the opposition players, numbering 8, the two team managers, and some supportive parents. I pseudo warmed-up doing a few loose swings dusting the tee with my club head, addressed the ball swinging my hips, and then, zeroing in on the ball with lazer-beam focus, I took a wide long coiled swing. Boooooom. the ball ricocheted at knots speed off of the club face. My head flew up in expectation of witnessing the ball careening tiger line down the fair way. but alas, there it was dribbling, bobbing, skipping like Heidi in the Alps, landing gently, deftly, maybe, 100meters away. I heard a clap. A clap.
My captain sympathetic to the moment, walked up to me, hand on shoulder, positively consoling me, he offered, 'Chaity, it'll work'.

I learnt, while working at Osmond Lange about the necessity of ‘grain’ in architecture. Fine grain creates interest in architecture. It's that which holds the attention of the passerby, it keeps the eye engaged and the spirit uplifted. Jutting balconies, recesses in the façade, projecting nibs and recessed nooks, windows and their cills, pushes and pulls on the face of the building, the play of light and shade. The architectural dance. This is the fine grain.

The Marc and the ENS building play a different game. They make use of solid forms generating 'wow's' from afar. but up close, its homogenous, flat. When we were small kids we played with square and circle and triangular blocks. but as we grew up we took on toys with more definition, finer details, intricacies like Lego, model building, Technica, and Mechano.

I've no doubt the building performs functionally and that its economically viable. The two street access points are endearing. and I still get a smile when I pass by the Pineapple.i love how the The ENS drips off down the buildings façade like liquid Crayola. and im eager to get a cappuccino moustache at Seattle soon.

But I will stop short when we draw 'cool' shapes and begin calling it architecture.

I heard a poignant quote by one of contemporary times most lauded architects, he of Guggenheim fame, Frank Gehry, 'most of our cities are built with just faceless glass, only for economies and not for humanities'. Sadly, this has become all too true. 

The Sasol Building

I think I had a pretty lekker childhood. We had friends that lived alongside a giant piece of dirt. There as the last boerie had been grazed off of the still warm bbq we’d tie our North Stars tight, we’d grab a stick of Bubbalicious, saddle up our bmx’s and race into the dirty dry veld. We’d do bunny hops and skids and ramp off dangerous stuff. That we did as the sun shone high in the sky. As the golden orb plummeted we’d all scuttle into the ‘spare room’ where the giant Scale-Electrix was installed. Its swirling tracks, its switch backs, its gleaming formula-one cars, painted red beaming like a star in the spot-light’s glow. Man alive I was living a Tron movie. After the thumb action, we’d all huddle on the one 3-seater couch, grab the well worn VHS cassette out the plastic box, jam it into the machine, push down, hit rewind and then hit play. It was Speilberg’s E.T. and we were glued mesmerised.

Bumbling down Katherine street during my lunch hour, I came upon (no innuendo intended) the Sasol building. 

The Sasol building which sits on Katherine Street in Sandton hyper-speeded my mind back to those heavenly 80’s of pliable He-Man, Spaceballs, Tron, Fanta Grape, puffy aerobic socks and Spielberg movies.

My close encounter with this kind of architecture left me dumbed for only it could have been conceived by an lsd-infused architecture student-it sits as unfamiliar, alien-like, and out of place. Coming from a school of architecture where order and geometry were the established modes of design, this is certainly colouring-outside-of-the lines.

It is a strange, odd looking edifice. It has no back , it has no front. It’s androgynous. It’s menacing as it projects its arms outwards piercing the sky. It is beautiful to photograph for it is dynamic. It’s facadal folds, the rolling of the sun and the ebb and flow of any kind of cloud across the sky present the building differently each day, each hour, each minute. Its reflective face depicts the daily duties of Pez-like public transport-mini taxis and Ubers trading places. In. drop off. Out. In. drop off. Out.

Pedestrians , I see, have no place. 

Its form is voluptuous, it’s sexy. It’s abstract, difficult to read, difficult to understand. What is its DNA-XY or YY?. It’s a squat bulging building pulled plasticine. It’s devoid of orientation. It’s mutant skin regulating its internals. It is as an objet d’art. I want to experience it as I would a Cianfanelli or a Dylan Lewis. I want to touch it, to stand along-side it, to experience its slanting walls. But as it sits as a polished diamond on its stone clad pedestal, I cannot.

Movies, art, sculpture, scale electrix are art. Architecture isn’t. Architecture isn’t solely an object to be experienced from afar in a magazine or online. Architecture is integral to its surroundings, it is a critical component of its landscape. It is there to be engaged, to be touched, to be felt. It should add to street life, it should enhance street life. It should tell a story, it should connect. The Sasol building is a non-fitting puzzle piece in a complex cityscape. It ought to fulfil a public role, it ought to give something to our city. As it sits on hits raised plinth, it’s impenetrable.  This expression is but a pretty picture, lessening the true role that architecture should be playing in acting as a catalyst for better integrating our city.

Buildings are erected to span time frames and occupants. I write this as the Creative Counsel Building sits empty, now for a year or so. Developed for one tenant’s vision and purpose it will have a difficult 2^nd life. So too, the Sasol building sits precariously.

Back in 2005 while trawling through Carnaby Street, London blowing tons of quids, I bought a pair of Levi’s bootlegs. They had paint splashes designed in them and a fabric inset at the boot to give them a bit of splay. They were cooler than ice as me and Richie rode the tube on Saturday evening s drinking Ribena and vodka pre-gaming before a night in a club in Kings Cross.

Those pair of jeans saw the height of alternative rock, they saw Pearl Jam live in Tottenham Court Road, they saw Dave Matthews in Birmingham, they saw Cold Play at Isle of Wight, they saw Radiohead. They saw the Royal Albert Hall and Nobu restaurant. They saw it all. But 15 years later on I’m not sure I’d take them out again. Their blue haze has faded, their time has passed.

I fear that’s the Sasol building.