The old man, when he still worked in the city, drove past the Joburg Civic Centre every night on his way home. Sixteen floors of blinding white light that could probably be seen from space (though no-one ever thought to ask any astronauts) would be guaranteed to put him in a rage.
“Look at this … this utter waste,” he would mutter as he drove past, alternately gripping and thumping the steering wheel. He had a thing about turning off the lights when we were out of the room. But 16 floors of light, when we knew that no-one was home ― that was the stuff of apoplexy.
It’s not difficult to say how he would feel now, knowing that the 48,000 civil servants who used to draw out their days inside that monstrous edifice have been shifted to other expensive properties across the city ever since the Civic Centre was declared an unsafe place to work … and where they probably still leave the lights on when they toddle off home at the end of the day’s labours. It would be unprintable.
Depending on what numbers you believe, fixing up the Civic would cost about R800m, tearing it down and rebuilding between R2bn-R3bn, and that’s before adding the years of rent frittered away on other office space.
Looking at the pictures of the former residential site that was cleared to make way for the building in the early 1960s, it’s hard not to feel that the city might have been a lot better off without that brutalist, stale Marie biscuit-hued wall rearing up over the Joburg skyline, ruining the ridge in much the same way as the Joburg Gen, now Charlotte Maxeke Hospital, would also do not too many years later. At least the hospital still works, most of the time.
Now, as the mayoral campaign begins to gallop, the Civic Centre looms over the contenders’ campaigns like a concrete tsunami. Brace for impact, maybe.
