ABSTRACT
By the 1970s there was little to impede consolidation of the apartheid state’s control and barrage of towers proposed for historic Church Square. Much of this architecture was rendered in service of a nationalism to unify a white nation. Narratives were advanced that spoke of differences in culture. Vernacular architecture traditions were seen as constitutive of these differences and constructed around questionable notions of ethnicity and authenticity. Architects were able to press the idea in Pretoria that a certain kind of architecture reflected the apartheid states’s project for rapid industrialisation and modernisation. State buildings with a bold and singular presence in the city instilled a sense for the white population of permanence and inevitability. Architecture became an instrument of the Afrikaners’s ambitions harnessed to achieve certitude as much as marshal civil servants and white citizens. The apartheid regime was hard pressed to maintain the untrammelled growth and economic development of a modern industrial state given the unequal and oppressive straits to which they had brought the country. A succession of architectural spectres came to haunt the capital over the following decade as these ruthless visions and banal administrative slabs began to weigh on the capital.
