Master Dissertation by Nicolas De Clercq

The Standard Bank Centre, completed in Johannesburg in 1970, is a 158-metre office tower in which thirty floors hang from three tiers of prestressed concrete cantilevers. Engineering literature has celebrated it as a triumph of structural logic, as if the hanging structure emerged inevitably from the constraints of its brief rather than from the contingent reality of a building design process shaped by financial pressure, construction failures, and the political economy of the building site. This dissertation argues that the celebratory account is incomplete, and that we need to tell a fuller story that moves beyond the myth of structural inevitability.

The dissertation demonstrates that principal published sources, such as the Zunz paper (ICE, 1971), the Arup Journal articles, and the monograph on the building by the architects HPP, operate within the conventions of engineering publication, a genre that leaves many blinds spots regarding institutional pressures, construction-site contingencies, or labour conditions. Such blinds spots are - partly - filled in working with previously unexplored archival material, and develops a first exploration of alternative explanations regarding the choice of a suspended structure, related to issues regarding the building’s situation on an urban square, a precedent in the architects’ portfolio and the conditions of construction in an apartheid context.