Architecture fans who were surprised by the Caracas-based Torre David project at the 13th Venice International Architecture Biennale, will find at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh another interesting project reuniting photography, architecture and social issues - "Ponte City" by South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky and British artist Patrick Waterhouse (until 26th April 2015).
As you may remember from a previous post, the Torre David building, designed by Venezuelan architect Enrique Gòmez, was abandoned after its developer died and after the collapse of the Venezuelan economy in the '90s, though in later years a vibrant community installed itself into the forty-five-storey office tower, recreating inside it a sort of city within a city.
"Ponte City" focuses instead on a 54-storey cylindrical tower that dominates the Johannesburg skyline. Planned in the '60s at the height of the apartheid era, and originally built for white people, this ambitious block of flats became during the '90s a refuge for black newcomers from the townships and rural areas, and for immigrants arriving from other places in Africa. As the years passed, the building turned into a symbol of urban decadence and the epicentre of crime, prostitution and drug dealing.
Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse started working in Ponte City after 2007 when the developers' plan to refurbish the building ran aground. The duo spoke to the tenants who hadn't been evicted, took pictures and documented the life in this temporary autonomous vertical zone.
Starting from 2008, Subotzky and Waterhouse collected for five years documents (including promotional materials about the building looking like an idyllic place) and debris from the abandoned apartments, recreating a geography of the tenants' lives, photographing the tenants in their flats, in the lifts and in the hallways or taking pictures of views that opened over the city.
Occupying the entire space of the Photography Gallery, the exhibition looks at different aspects of the building: smaller and larger pictures seem scattered on the walls at impossible heights almost to replicate the windows of the tower block. There's a lovely girl in a pink party dress in a lift, children playing in a kitchen, a man walking in what looks like a desolate empty swimming pool, but there are also views of the doors and windows and of the flats from the inside to the outside.
Subotzky and Waterhouse also take the visitors inside the heart of the tower, with its empty space in the middle filled with rubble and debris, a hole where many dreams of the future ended into violent social decline when some of the residents committed suicide.
The images try to recreate the background story of Ponte (if you want to know more about it you can also check out the eponymous volume edited by Ivan Vladislavic and published by Steidl): when it was first planned in the '60s, Ponte was destined to become the tallest block of flats in the Berea suburb of the city, an area that was quickly developing together with another vibrant neighbourhood, Hillbrow.
The latter had turned into Johannesburg's equivalent of New York's Greenwich Village, an entertainment area with cafés, bars, clubs and late night book and record stores, so hopes were high for Berea when the construction of Ponte began in 1971. Things changed, though, after the Soweto student uprising in 1976, and with the following property market collapse.
There are notions in this section that will be particularly interesting for those visitors keen on discovering more about materials and their origins. Ponte was made using 52,000 cubic metres of concrete and incorporating 2,600 tons of steel. All the components used to build it - from the gas-beton partition walls to the plaster, paint, epoxy, electricity cables, plumbing pipes, tiles, kitchen sinks, but also furnishings, curtains and bedspreads (as the apartments were originally all furnished) - can be tracked unravelling a supply chain. Stone and sand were probably quarried from volcanic hillsides in the northwest of Johannesburg; the cement was extracted from the Lichtenburgh area; stones were mixed with water pumped from the Vaal River while steel was produced in the industrial plants of East Rand.
The building was also characterised by hideous divisions: floors 41 to 46 featured extravagant penthouses that included a raised platform holding a double bed with views over the open plan bathroom and living room. The roof terraces with sun decks attached to the luxury four bedroom flats included rooms for 42 servants, living quarters that were separated from the spaces dedicated to the white penthouse inhabitants.
The convention of the time was indeed that of locating servants on the roof, though the initial plan of the building was supposed to integrate them at the base to "screen them from view, both from the road and the neighbouring buildings" so that "they should prove no nuisance either visually or from a noise point of view." In 1975 a compromise was reached with servants and sun decks sharing the roof, but with the sills at above six foot, so that the black staff couldn't look out at the white apartments and ended up living in gloomy spaces.
One of the first people Subotzky and Waterhouse met when they started working on their project is Mbabazeni Hallelujah Madlala who lived and worked at Ponte for over thirty years. His first job was cleaning the swimming pool and he had to be careful to keep his eyes on the ground when the women sunbathing at the pool were all white. Madlala worked his way up becoming general handyman, caretaker and occasional security officer to the building.
The last section of the exhibition is particularly interesting as the collage on the last wall made with fragments of the tenants' lives, sums up the multi-dimensional and multi-cultural history of Ponte City. Notebooks, photographs, handwritten resumes, birthday cards, banknotes, a map of Africa, a comb, and a box of asthma and bronchitis mixture - discarded belongings and inanimate objects with their own voice - form a sort of archaeology of the place. The collage hints at the fact that this visual, artistic, architectural, historical and social research represents an allegory for the evolution of Johannesburg and South African society, but leaves the story open. Visitors are given the tools to act as archaeologists and unveil the past of this building and maybe forecast its future through the archives provided by Subotzky and Waterhouse.
The life at Ponte does indeed go on with the notorious building currently trying to find a new life, but remaining a symbol of too many dichotomies, a concrete incarnation of the local dreams and nightmares, a refuge and an architectural monster, and an emblem of the dystopian utopia created by urban planners and architects.
Image credits for this post
All images Mikhael Subotzky & Patrick Waterhouse, Ponte City, 2008-2013 © Magnum Photos
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