THE MEASURE OF THE CAPE
Cape Town Heritage Trust and the Cape Institute for Architecture present
An exhibition of measured drawings and Arthur Elliott photographs from GE Pearse's
18TH CENTURY ARCHITECTURE IN SOUTH AFRICA
Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town * 25 March - 9 April 2006
Curator: Stewart Harris
In 1935, GE Pearse, the first professor of Architecture at Witwatersrand University, published his landmark book Eighteenth Century Architecture in South Africa. It was chiefly a collection of measured drawings of Cape houses. There were brief notes about the buildings shown, and also some photographs by Arthur Elliott and others. Pearse summarised the history of the building period, the architects reputed to have designed the houses, and gave an explicit account of the building methods and materials used.
It became the standard work on Cape Dutch architecture for 18 years till overtaken by de Bosdari’s Cape Dutch Houses and Farms in 1953 – and even then remained current because of the unrivalled quality of the measured drawings. And also, frankly, because it was a delicious book.
It is often described as ‘monumental’ but it wasn’t very long. Pearse described 35 houses, compared to 5 700 in Hans Fransen’s recent Guide to Cape Architecture. It felt monumental because the paper it was printed on was so luxuriously thick, the quarto size so awesome, and the handsome binding so sumptuous.
Its great heritage significance is that this was the first methodical study of Cape buildings, the first time a representative sample of Cape buildings had been brought together (in the ‘comparative method’) and the underlying themes and commonalities allowed to emerge.
But it is most memorable because of the cool and elegant measured drawings, made chiefly by a young architectural student, John Fassler. Fassler re-drew the measurements taken by a variety of people in a wonderfully complex and informative way. Plans, sections and elevations: the rudimentary measurements necessary to describe a spatial object, are transformed by Fassler into works of art, where the intersecting lines, disposition of shapes and balance of line and background pull together into forms with their own logic and tensions.
The drawings, which were thought to have been lost, were a bequest by the publisher AA Balkema to Gawie Fagan who has donated them to the Cape Archives.
An exhibition of the original drawings – with explanatory interpretation panels and some Arthur Elliott photographs – is on display at the Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town, from 25 March to 9 April 2006. It was planned by the Cape Town Heritage Trust and the Cape Institute for Architecture, curator Dr Stewart Harris.
Click on titles below to see pictures and discussion
