Eerste River Multi-Purpose Centre

The site sits in a broad, narrow valley with mountains in the distance, and is amidst the low-cost housing of Eerste River.

On the adjacent site, to its immediate southwest, the recently completed library building, partially hidden behind tall blue gums, is a long, north-south building with an entrance on its northeast corner, reached by a narrow-tarred road which forms the south boundary of the multipurpose centre site. The library building is a simple, long-form with its double-pitched roof split to bring in light from the east through a clerestory. Its entrance is a double volume glass and steel box, clearly legible from the access road.

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CLIENT:

City Of Cape Town

LOCATION:

Eerste River

STATUS:

Complete

Press:

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Brief

The brief required a multi-purpose hall, which could also be used for community events, along with the usual service areas and a smaller hall and spaces for minimal meetings.

The architect decided to place the main body of the building as far north on the site as possible, forming a community court on the south and create the entrance from the main access road on the east side. Other planning concerns were the acknowledgment of the library entrance, the sense of the valley, and the harvesting of rainwater.

Design

Key to the design concept is the building as a water gatherer. To this end, the gesture is bold.

A single three-dimensional twist of the building’s axis achieves a number of things simultaneously: the shaping of the roof as an inverted, split plane, echoes the valley, and channels the rainwater directly to the water tanks at the southwest end. The rectangular sports hall attaches on the north side of the box gutter and creates triangular porticos on the south and north sides. These present opportunities to play with the dynamic tensions created on these sides of the building. The necessary fall on the central box gutter creates enough height for another floor level, from which one overlooks the indoor sports activities. From this mezzanine level, one is able to see over the houses to the valley and hills in the distance. The height achieved at the building’s southeast corner marks the entrance as a double volume clad in glass and steel, thus referencing the neighbour library entrance, without resorting to bland mimicry.

Form-making aside, the engineered aspects of making the building are transparently and lyrically integrated throughout. Architect and engineer have combined their efforts finely, using modest industrial materials to create an understated, yet an appropriately civic piece of architecture. The decision to make the deep concrete water channel as a structural spine for the building has worked to lighten the loads on the outer columns, and the rationalisation of the steel trussed roof over the walls of the sports hall bring a lightness that works well with the colonnades to give the building its characteristic aerial quality. Largely solid brick walls contain the multi-purpose hall. The interior finishes are simple and practical, with face brick up to door height, plastered upper walls with square punctured openings in the structural bays. This creates an interior character reminiscent of the shed-like school halls to be found all over the Cape Flats, but the lifting tracery of steel trusses flying over the walls counters this ordinariness.

Vernon Mathews speaks passionately about the dimensional rationality of the building, which would be good as an intention alone, but he does not use the term “rationality” or even “dimension”.

He talks in terms of the actual detailing, the modular setting out; the way each truss is unique yet cut out of the same pattern as the others, changing along the length of the gutter beam. Despite the bold diagonal of the gutter beam, the trusses are planned on a regular grid that corresponds precisely with the window mullions and the regulation of the outer columns. This focus on the act of construction is evident in the detailing and also comes through in the attitude to the making of the outer columns.

It’s a very classical building in the way its details and its structural grid create an exterior-interior language. This language is seen in the abstracted column “orders” which front the façade. The classicism is subliminal rather than obvious in the complex dance of light and shadow at the upper levels of the structure. The colonnades are placed at the farthest edge of the roof and are made up of plastered pedestals at door height, on top of which are slender, steel “Doric” columns, that lightly receive the latticework of the roof. These orders are elongated and calmly paced down the long facades of the building. They pick up the proportions and structural textures of the roof members. Externally, the red brick, plaster, glass, and steel combine with the careful composition and witty orders to create a screened classical, yet overtly engineered aesthetic.

The building is boldly made to be seen from a distance, but it’s not arrogant or overstated.

It seems to sit on a slight rise with a negligible plinth if any. The inverted roof gives a welcoming shape and the contrasting heights of the corners create a counterpoint that is not overeager. The planned side extensions will create a community court toward the adjacent street and the green treed site to the south. The building, in its present form, and given its restrained strength, proposes the further development of an elegant community precinct. The architect’s approach was to assume as context the creation of the precinct). The proposed concept related the sports facility to a court, formed by two wings to the south, to relate the multi-purpose centre to the library, the green court and established trees on the site. Community life would be drawn to this precinct and this would begin the development of the surrounding area.

The water storage area raises the question of what to do with the water. The formal references to the library building, such as the steel fenestration and entrance, might suggest another scale of architectural elements which would act as signifiers at a planning level. These lead to possibilities of collaborative conversations between architects in the articulation of local community architecture and in the making of community places, which provincial budgeting and procurement strategies would probably be well-placed to facilitate.