Art Deco, modernity, and the politics of ornament in South African architecture, 1930–1940

• Published in: The Routledge Companion to Art Deco pp. 253 - 270
• Main Author: Freschi, Federico
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2019
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Alexandr Rodchenko; Art Deco; Young Man; South African Architecture; South African Architects; Elsa Schiaparelli; Art Deco Architecture; Decorative Program; Paul Cret; Vice Versa; Fibrous Plaster; Art Deco Style; Bird’s Eye; Large Scale Architectural Projects; Voortrekker Monument; Dominant Verticality; South African Buildings; Bristol Aeroplane Company; Art Deco Buildings; Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation; Nineteenth Century Boer
• ISBN: 1472485149; 9781472485144
• DOI: 10.4324/9780429032165-14

For most architects practicing in South Africa during the 1930s, the notion of modernity was a question of style rather than substance. The development of the Art Deco style as a vocabulary of self-conscious modernity in South African architecture of the 1930s must be viewed against two intertwined socio-political factors. First, the abandoning of the gold standard in 1932, and second, the coalition, in 1933, of JBM Hertzog’s predominantly Afrikaner, pro-republican Nationalist Party and Jan Smuts’s predominantly English, pro-commonwealth South African Party. Architects in South Africa were increasingly incorporating depictions of African animals and people into their decorative programs, particularly in public buildings. The challenge to the orthodoxy of colonial classicism began to assert itself in the early 1930s, particularly in Johannesburg. As land values increased and buildings began rising higher, the stylistic problems of maintaining the conventions of the essentially domestic vocabulary of the colonial classical style on an ever-increasing vertical plane inevitably led to experimentation with other forms.