Page 19 - Bulletin 7 2003

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scale, finish, even groundplans were standardised to a very large extent; a uniformity
only here and there relieved by subordinated decorations like a dakkamer or a fancy

gable, a pedimental relief, a wavy parapet or an edge moulding – even these
answering to strict stylistic codes that no one could escape. This standardisation,

born of necessity in a pioneering community, made it possible for rank-and-file

builders to develop an easily applicable set of proportions, based on universally valid
principles. All this produced a highly consistently designed architecture, without any

works of genius but with a high average level of rightness of scale and proportions.
This homogeneity can partly be attributed to the fact that so many buildings were

erected or re-fashioned within a span of not much more than half a century, from
1755 to 1820.

What is it that makes this largely utilitarian, run-of-the-mill architecture so attractive
th
to us today? Even at the time, and during the later 19 century, the streets and farms
of the Cape were favourite subjects for artists such as Davis, Bowler, Langschmidt

and Malan, and the volume of the work they produced – much of it documentary in
nature, but often showing a clear delight at the subject at hand – is large in relation to

the size of the colony. It is somehow difficult to imagine many artists today being
inspired by the sight of modern Greenmarket Square with its incoherent array of

buildings, also mostly dating from within half a century, but each trying to be
different and to ignore its neighbours. If we regret the loss of most of our old

architecture, what we regret most is perhaps not so much the loss of the actual

buildings, but the passing of an era that produced a modest architecture of such unity,
so right and so fitting and without the wilfulness that makes much of the subsequent

architecture so bewildering.

The buildings that were erected at the Cape then were decidedly not all meant to
survive till the present day, but to be succeeded by other buildings in another equally

unified style, equally fitted to changing purpose and conditions. But the subsequent

upheavals of the machine age could hardly have been foreseen, and today we can
only hope that what little remains from before the industrial age will stay to remind

us of the values of a different time.