Henry Paine and Partners

In the article below, journalist Lucille Davie explores the painful history behind the Worker's Library and Museum in Newtown. The piece was originally published on the City of Joburg's website on 10 October 2008. Click here to view more of Davie's work.

The Newtown Workers' Electricity Compound, the last remaining example of a workers' compound, exposes the brutal underbelly of living conditions for black workmen in apartheid Johannesburg. It is to be opened in 2009 as a museum commemorating the municipal workers of the city.

Men used to sleep in long rows of hard concrete "beds", next to one another, a small concrete lip separating one from the next, with no privacy. A wooden platform above the concrete beds accommodated more men. Each dormitory contained a coal stove, used for heating and cooking, while dishes and probably clothes were washed in a long slanted concrete basin directly outside the dorms. Bathrooms with open showers were at the eastern side of the building. 

Long rows of hard concrete "beds" (Lucille Davie)

Built in 1913 and referred to nowadays as the Workers' Library and Museum, the Newtown Workers' Electricity Compound consists of three semi-detached "shiftmen's" or artisans' cottages, and a stand-alone manager's house. Directly behind them are several corrugated iron shacks, housing domestic workers who worked for the artisans and manager.

And...

"Shandukani is a Venda word meaning 'change' and is an appropriate name for a facility that represents multiple aspects of positive change: the value of public/private partnerships; the transformation of a derelict building with heritage status into a thoroughly modern facility that nonetheless preserves its historical stature; and the positive impact on change we can all have." Yael Horowitz

The award winning Shandukani project, part of the Hillbrow Health Precinct, is quickly becoming an iconic South African adaptive reuse case study. We are very happy to bring you the Architect's summary of the project as well as some phenomenal before and after photograph. Thank you to Kylie Dixon of Henry Paine & Partners. 

The project is the result of collaboration between the Department of Heath, The Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute (WRHI) and is sponsored by Vodacom (Pty) Ltd, Altech and Altron (Allied Electronics Corporation Limited) with the objective of creating a maternity hospital and research centre from an existing building that was part of the old General Hospital or 'Hillbrow Hospital' as it was known. The area is now known as the Hillbrow Health Precinct.

Brief

We, as the architects, were asked to adapt the old operating theatre and x-ray building into prenatal and antenatal facilities that will be operated by the Department of Health as well as a research centre that is to be run by WRHI. We were asked to design "a 'happy place' with unintimidating materials, finishes and furnishings; that it should be more like a...