The Soweto Theatre is a landmark structure built in an area with a powerful history. In the article below, Johannesburg enthusiast and well-known journalist Lucille Davie unpacks the details behind the theatre's design and construction. She also reveals the significance of the Jabulani Amphitheatre next door. The article was originally published on the City of Johannesburg's website on 12 June 2012. Click here to view more of Davie's work.
If there ever was a building that could speak, the Soweto Theatre would speak loudly, and in many languages. The theatre consists of three large colourful boxes – in red, yellow and blue – contained within two soaring concave buttress walls on either side. The foyer faces south through an expansive glass frontage, overlooking the vastness of Soweto. The entrance is finished with a huge canvas roof, complementing the curves of the buttress walls.
Different textures, different materials, different angles, different shapes... but all talking to one another in harmony in a building that makes a bold statement in Jabulani, a suburb that is undergoing a lift-off.
“We have let the boxes be pure shapes,” says Tony de Oliveira, senior technologist at Chibwe Afritects, the firm that won the tender to design the theatre. Each box contains a theatre. It opened a month ago with the superb production The Suitcase.
The red box greets the visitor in the foyer – covered in a 15m high wall of red gleaming tiles, reaching up and over the roof but also into the basement, visible...
