Yasmin Mayat

Dating from the early 20th century, the Workers Cottages in Newtown, Johannesburg, form part of the Workers Museum Complex. The Workers Museum is located in a former black migrant workers’ hostel, with the adjacent cottages built for white staff and supervisors. The museum speaks of the harsh segregated labour practices in the city with the relative comfort of the adjacent cottages further highlighting the segregation and prejudice that existed between workers of different races.

Location of the Workers' Cottages

Workers' Museum (The Heritage Portal)

The cottages, facing onto Mary Fitzgerald Square, had fallen into a state of disrepair and were left crumbling and unusable after a failed renovation project in the mid 2000s. The project aimed to bring the cottages back to a condition where they could be used for offices for the Museum as well as spaces for various tenants and NGO’s that support arts, culture and heritage. From the beginning the tight budget was used as a means to conceptually guide the project. Botched renovations and the stripping out of sections of the building were seen as an opportunity to reveal the underlying materiality of the building. The building was...

This article originally appeared in the do.co.mo.mo journal. Thank you to the authors for giving us permission to republish. Click here to view the article as it appeared in do.co.mo.mo journal 48 2013/1.

Aiton Court, in Johannesburg, is a case study in how heritage and economics clash in economically constrained cities. This iconic and formally innovative Modern apartment block from 1937 is located in an area where the income levels of tenants are now very low. Although the building is protected by legislation, the viability of its restoration is being further tested by a rent boycott. The article covers the building’s history, and questions how to approach its conservation differently, given the strong demand for housing at a cost level that would be excluded by purely market–led gentrification. We propose that locating conservation strategies in relation to the building’s history and to other subsidies aimed at the public good may provide other routes to preserving Aiton Court.

Aiton Court’s History

Aiton Court is an iconic and early Modern apartment building in Johannesburg’s dense suburb of Hillbrow [Main image / figure 1]. Designed by young South African architects Angus Stewart and Bernard Cooke in the mid–1930s, it reflects their exposure to the formal language of the CIAM architects through Cooke’s lecturer Rex Martienssen, the leader of what Le Corbusier termed the Groupe Transvaal (Le Corbusier, 1935; Herbert, 1975). The design of minimal apartments also shows the influence of their fellow student and political mentor Kurt Jonas who had studied housing rights in Berlin...