ABSTRACT
The longing for modernity and promises of technological advances in construction and materials yielded the indelible components of bureaucratic corporate development. State buildings presented severe and sterile forms without drawing on any of the broader social utopian commitments that held sway in the early period of the modern movement. Despite the growing diplomatic isolation and calls for sanctions, South Africa continued to be firmly entrenched in international capitalist banking and financial circles. This was an opportunistic faith in the destiny of Afrikaners who felt driven to entrench their vulnerable and contested position on the African continent. The Pretoria municipal administration block and the megastructure of the University of South Africa sprang up in the apartheid capital before the urban stance of apartheid consolidated. It was an architectural hegemony of efficiency in which a monolithic and reflective glass and steel architecture was readily imported from the United States for its expression of technocratic efficiency and authority. Afrikaners were looking to Americans with whom they felt an affinity as a modern society free of colonial history and were keen to emulate in architecture as much as in business.
