Building an Icon: House Hanson and Denstone Court

Kevin Fellingham, principal architect at Kevin Fellingham Architects, and a former lecturer at Cambridge University, UCT and the School of Explorative Architecture, talks about House Hanson and Denstone Court, built in 1937/38.

WORDS Kevin Fellingham PHOTOS Supplied

I would like to talk about a pair of Joburg buildings designed by Norman Hanson – one since demolished, the other altered beyond recognition. Both continue to exist as ideas recorded in drawings and memories, and captured in photographs. Had they been built today, they might appear unexceptional – but if we look at the photographs, the cars, the neighbours, the clothing and the horse-drawn cart, we can try to imagine just how strange they must have seemed almost 90 years ago. We still think of buildings like this as “modern”.

While the language of modern architecture has been shared among many architects, Hanson spoke it in his own way. It is the plans for his buildings that are extraordinary, with oblique and curved elements set in tension with a gridded rectangular order. Architects read plans in the same way as authors read books; and just as the novelist Cormac McCarthy confessed that all books are made from other books, architects will admit that all plans are made from other plans. We read into them not just the shapes of buildings, but the lives that have been, or will be, lived within them by people who will never be aware of the drawings that give rise to so much of their daily experience.

We experience the secret language of plans when we visit a building. We are led from one space to another by the gestures of walls, drawn to the doors and windows, guided through an organised sequence of visual and physical experiences of space, light and materiality. Le Corbusier coined the term “promenade architecturale” for this invention, inspired by the idea of a camera moving through a scene as a protagonist in the story.

At Hanson’s own home, the promenade begins when leaving the car, and moves around the corner of the cubic mass of the living room, past the giant window, under the oversailing mass of the bedrooms, towards a sunny inset courtyard, diagonally across a paved hallway, up a tall half-spiralling stairway, climbing towards the light, through a small door in a blank wall that delivers one to a brightly lit studio, which shares its smooth ceiling and giant window (the one passed upon entry) with the living room below, and down a nautical stair to that window, looking north across the suburban garden. Le Corbusier called the plan the generator – of form, and of experience in use. It is this way of thinking that was explained to me through the work of Hanson by the magician Pancho Guedes, and which led to me following a dual career as a designer of forward-looking buildings, and a historian and scholar of modern architecture.

As an architect, I know that every project is part of a family of other projects with which it likely shares DNA. Denstone Court would have been on the drawing boards at the same time as House Hanson. It was in the inner city, demolished to make space for the Carlton Centre. At the time of the design, Hanson was a bachelor, and it was as a home for bachelors that it was imagined. At the ground level was a car park – unheard of at the time – a filling station to fuel the cars, and a restaurant to feed the inhabitants. Like his own house, the route from the car – or the street – was choreographed to make returning home a delight; and like his home, the sequence ended with a view. In this case, the view was down Eloff Street, from a balcony approached by a nautical stair, and cantilevered out over the street like a ship’s bridge.

At his house, part of the building floated above the garden on cylindrical concrete columns, providing an outdoor living room of the type we still aspire to. In the city, the residents’ garden floated above the cityscape on a roof terrace. At ground level, the columns of the collective house were not cylindrical but curvaceous strong, shapely legs hoisting the whole building into the air. Columns very much like these appeared after the war in Le Corbusier’s famous Unite d’Habitation in Marseille, along with that oversailing balcony and the sloping parapet playing with perspective when seen from ground level.

We can’t know for sure if the master was influenced by the acolyte, but we do know that Rex Martienssen, Hanson’s closest co-conspirator in bringing the future to South Africa, took the drawings with him to Paris in 1938, to show to “Corbu”. All buildings are made from other buildings.

Hanson was later to turn away from the lyrical work of his youth to a technically more resolved and aesthetically more conservative social realism. The weightless abstraction implied by the so-called international style proved difficult to translate into durable buildings, the invisibility of details having been understood as a lack thereof. Even so, Hanson remains one of South Africa’s finest architects, setting the challenge for later generations to find a way of making buildings that are well crafted, responsive to the needs and desires of individuals and the wider society, and, most importantly, that bring pleasure to those who experience and use them. Like many of the progressive architects of his generation, he was obliged to leave the country of his birth to avoid the prying eyes of the state security apparatus.

His work reminds architects to look at the plan not as a result of a series of images, but as the core of our craft. It reminds us that architecture can be beautiful while being simple – or even, rather, humble. | @kevinfellinghamarchitects

 Don’t forget to sign up to our weekly newsletter for the latest architecture and design news.