ARCHITECTURE, STATE MODERNISM AND CULTURAL NATIONALISM IN THE APARTHEID CAPITAL

205pp., illus., paperback, Abingdon, 2021

Architect Hilton Judin on the architecture of the apartheid state from 1957 to 1966. Buildings in Pretoria such as the Atomic Research Centre and the University of Pretoria serve as case studies. Many of the documents, drawings and photographs in the book are previously unpublished and include classified material and photographs from the National Nuclear Research Centre and documents and pamphlets from Afrikaner Broederderbond archives

"In this new book, Hilton Judin tells the story of the unlikely marriage in postwar South Africa between the reactionary racism of the apartheid system and the technocratic, future-orientated utopianism of modernist architecture. In recent years, the distinctive forms of postwar modernism spawned by totalitarian communist regimes have been thoroughly investigated, but Judin’s book resoundingly fills in a glaring gap in knowledge at the other end of the ideological spectrum. It shows how modernist ideals and technologies, and grand, futuristic public building complexes – developed in alliance with an Afrikaner nationalism that also paradoxically concerned itself with researching ‘Bantu vernacular tradition’ - fuelled the mushrooming confidence and prosperity of the apartheid regime, and helped prolong its survival." Miles Glendinning, Professor of Architectural Conservation and Director, Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies, University of Edinburgh

Hilton Judin is Director of Postgraduate Architecture at the School of Architecture & Planning at Wits University. He developed the exhibition of apartheid state documents and public video testimonies [setting apart] with the History Workshop in Johannesburg and District Six Museum in Cape Town; curated and edited (with Ivan Vladislavić) blank____ Architecture, apartheid and after for the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and edited Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins: persistence of the past in the architecture of apartheid.