Clive Chipkin: Lover of the unloved

The N1 motorway at New Canada, southwest of Johannesburg, May 2009

“Joseph Conrad once said that it’s necessary to immerse yourself in the most destructive elements of the times, and then attempt to swim . . .” JG Ballard, from a 1976 interview

The quest: to find a language to fit the mood, shape and intractable silence of an uncommonly ordinary thing, although saying that, I wonder if it – this thing – can ever be described in the singular. Is it not really a collection of things? Gauteng’s heart attack highways. Appropriately, or is it stupidly, I attach myself to a language not my own for comfort, solace, or is it simply help. Somehow Afrikaans, this home-grown bastard, so blunt yet lyrical at the same time, is far more evocative when it comes to describing Johannesburg’s fatal inner-city landscapes, in particular the tangle of roads, flyovers, veld and human aftermath on its southern periphery.

To call the landscape surrounding the Heidelberg interchange rude is simply polite. It is far truer of things to say that the scene at the corner of End Street and Heidelburg Road, in the unlovely and in-between neighbourhood of City and Suburban, is onbeskof. It is an affront, although even this loose translation bleaches all colour from the word. So onbeskof it is, a contrived mess, one that I invited Clive Chipkin, a self-described “reluctant architect” and Johannesburg city historian, to explain.

Car parked up against the pavement, the two of us head for an open patch of veld. Our intention: to look at a bridge, actually the bridge – “Bridge 6”. For as long as I’ve known this anonymous piece of civil engineering floating over the Heidelberg interchange, I’ve associated it with traffic fines, the 80km/h speed limit here plainly onbeskof. In Chipkin’s eyes, however, this “steel viaduct,” as he describes it, is far more than just a useful place to install a traffic camera. It is, as he told me last year when we first met, “one of the greatest pieces of sculptural achievement”.

Approaching it is quite a trick. Which is how we ended up parked outside a grey building marked No. 1 End Street. Across the road, we find a footpath. It ducks beneath a blackened underpass. Not to sound all fancy, but the scene here recalls something painter Francis Bacon said of one of his paintings: “It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another.” Bacon could just as easily have been describing the fetid little patch of land near the Heidelberg interchange. Here a burnt out fire, there a suitcase mysteriously wedged into a cement crevice. Splayed across the footpath, a fleshing little something, food perhaps. If Johannesburg’s outdoors are a free art gallery, as Chipkin (and many others) would suggest, it bears mentioning that its treasures are brutal and unromantic.

“It is terribly elegant,” counters Chipkin as Bridge 6 comes into full view. “It curves, rises, does a hundred pieces of geometrical movement, all very, very …” He gets sidetracked by a detail in the construction. “It is not concrete, it is box-framed plate,” he says of the metal bridge. The riveting, perhaps equally benign in the eyes of many, is also lovingly singled out. Still, it’s only a bridge and there is only so much you can say about it, rainy Wednesday morning or not, which prompts our next decision.

“You see how it drives,” enthuses Chipkin as the car follows the bridge’s south-westerly curve. “It is beautifully cambered, and it is rising to get the right levels, and it’s turning, and it’s steel, and it’s on loose ground, so it has to be mobile.” Mobility, it turns out, is key to understanding Bridge 6’s eccentric design. In his forthcoming book, Johannesburg Transition (2009), a dispassionate account of Johannesburg’s “promiscuous nature and the endless parodies of other cities”, Chipkin dedicates a brief few lines to this bridge. Straddling unstable mining ground, the bridge, he explains, was designed by German consulting engineers Baubro Grassl. It was completed in 1972.

“And that’s it,” he concludes as we clear the bridge and connect with traffic on the M2. The experience of crossing it lasts less than half a minute, if that. “It’s as short and small as that but it’s one of those pieces of engineering that successfully linked up things.”

Linking things up. Connecting the dots. Making sense of Gauteng’s highways. Now there’s a plan.

Fifty years ago traffic volumes between Johannesburg and Pretoria averaged about 4,800 vehicles per day; nowadays the three-lane highway between these two landlocked cities conveys more than 180,000 vehicles daily – that’s 60,000 more than the total number of cars licensed in Johannesburg in 1957. Recognising that something needs to be done about the mad crush, cabinet recently approved plans to pump R20 billion into alleviating Gauteng’s congestion problems. But that’s the future. It is the crowded now that holds us, often very literally.

Two unrelated events led me to Chipkin, in my search for something beyond the usual commentary on Gauteng’s roads. Usual commentary? Aside from the familiar themes – functionality (frustrating), size (gargantuan) and safety (perilous) – the province’s heart attack highways remain a mystery. Very little is written in the popular press about their rich history. It took a middle finger to stumblingly lead me to this realisation.

The middle finger belonged to the driver – black if you must ask – of an old Merc. This jennelman, to borrow from ee cummings, was adamant about getting to Pretoria a few seconds ahead of everyone else. Weaving through traffic, he saw a gap in the fast lane: me. Without fuss, he as nudged into the emergency lane on my motorcycle. I hooted. His response: up yours. Eish. Then, a couple more experiences with wayward drivers later, a Sunday Times profile on Rob Byrne, a traffic announcer, in the Insight & Opinion pages no less. My interest was sparked. I started keeping notes on this thing, this highway so much a part of negotiating Johannesburg.

The earliest note, dated June 5, 2006, reads: “Two pieces of pine planking, tapered, like large splinters; bits of plastic bumper; cigarette butts; a crumpled piece of paper; more cigarette butts; glass from a shattered window; other things less easily described, all fleetingly observed from the car at stationary intervals. You look at them; their placement and location is random, determined by accident – an unfortunate word in some cases. They say nothing about the congested frustration, the waiting.”

My favourite ‘observation’ is dated October 4, 2006: “A fat woman in a red shirt, next to her a skinny man, both seated in fold-up chairs at the Buccleuch interchange. Are they studying the traffic? What do their clipboards prompt them to look out for? Nearby, the new electronic sign reads “NO INCIDENTS AHEAD”. Less than a 100 metres on, in the fast lane, a pulverised Honda is parked near a dump truck angled into the concrete barrier. “FUCK DA POLICE” reads graffiti on the rear of the truck. An orange Metro Police car, a Mercedes, pulls up to the scene.”

It was however the Zimbabweans, a people so easily ring fenced by a nationalist pejorative, a people endlessly seen washing up and down the highway, who delivered the most telling insight. Telling because the scene encompassed so much – without yielding anything.

December 9, 2007: “The busses ferrying Zimbabweans from Braamfontein to the north are oil-perfumed wrecks. Two of them have broken down today: one at Buccleuch, the other beneath the bridge where Brett Kebble was shot, the spot marked by a pot plant and kink in the protective railing.” It was a Sunday when I made this note. The latter of the two breakdowns remains particularly memorable. A few feet below where Brett Kebble died, a young man lay on a pink leather sofa. Retrieved from the roof of the broken bus, he had parked it in the emergency lane.

It was with this jumble of experiences, observations and half-arsed insights that I knocked on Chipkin’s office door, situated in the bucolic suburb of Parkview. He proved remarkably courteous. “You’re exploring a situation which is only latent,” he said of my whimsical interest in highways and their connectedness to Johannesburg. “You might find an architect who is terribly articulate but I, as quite a middle-ground architect, haven’t got all your answers. But it is terrific to explore such an unnoticed thing. It is also very important.”

The conversation could have ended there. It didn’t. In part, I suspect, it is because the elevated highways piercing through central Johannesburg cue an important theme in Chipkin’s own writings: Johannesburg’s perplexing identity as a city.

A Wits graduate, Chipkin first started writing about architecture in the late 1950s, after returning to Johannesburg from England – via India – in 1957. His first article, published in the South African Architectural Record, was on Indian architecture. A fitting subject: Herbert Baker and Edwin Lutyens, two signal figures in Johannesburg’s early architectural history and indeed Chipkin’s writings generally, left South Africa to work in India, the crown jewel of the imperial project.

Although prolific, co-authoring along the way a book on Parktown, it was only in 1993 that Chipkin announced himself as something more than an itinerant voice. His book Johannesburg Style is a classic, offering an incisive history of this city’s uneven and often garish built environment. Of the writing itself, it is interested, witty, empirical, and very often concerned with detail, but not bogged down by it. Ivan Vladislavic, an admirer of Chipkin’s knowledge of Johannesburg, says he predates theory, as in his writing shuns trendy –isms and –ologies. In this he recalls Hemingway, if not stylistically then at least philosophically. Wrote the boozy old newsman: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over…”

Of his interest in writing, Chipkin is modest: “I always felt a need to find what I am thinking; I don’t know what I’m thinking until I have expressed it somehow.”

Unlike some architectural writers, he allows his thinking to be influenced my more than just an appreciative eye. Chipkin is also a good listener.

“A well-heeled conversationalist on the upper deck of the Parktown North bus once-declared with a flourish, ‘Johannesburg has no style’,” Chipkin records in the preface to Johannesburg Style (1993). “On another occasion I overheard a snippet of street conversation: ‘Johannesburg is net deurmekaar’.” He wanted to title his first book as much. Stern advisors warned him off it. People would get mixed-up.

To an extent, the M1, which follows a north-south axis, and the M2, an east-west axis, represented an attempted to untangle the mess Chipkin’s forsaken title alludes to. Conceived in 1955-56 by urban planner Maurice Rotival – in conjunction with American consultants – and completed in phases, starting in 1966, the highways acted as a much-needed gateway to the city. Their impact was enormous.

“The new peripheral elevated road system took an amorphous spreadeagled city on the plains, tied it together in an urban package and provided a sense of recognition for visitors and locals alike,” writes Chipkin in Johannesburg Transition.

Driving along the M2, to see these words made manifest, Chipkin neatly paraphrased his own writing. “Johannesburg was a very vague city. You weren’t quite sure what it was. You had to travel all over it to know it. But this [the highway] gave it comprehension, I think.”

Of course, comprehension wasn’t the only intended outcome.

“But, as always, with Johannesburg’s modernisation we must pause to observe deep-seated anxieties,” writes Chipkin in his new book. “All the advantages and betterment of the huge capital expenditure accrued to the white areas. The motorways, conspicuously, did not connect into the vast Black ghetto locations. In part, they acted as a visual and movement barrier to reinforce segregation.”

Driving back from our brief urban expedition, I ask Chipkin about the contradictions so much a part of twentieth century architecture, contradictions that extend to the seemingly dull practice of urban planning. In particular, I mean the idealism and the hubris that defines modern architecture. The widening gulf between the promise and the outcome.

“I am not sure whether my generation’s work was liked,” concedes Chipkin, whose ideological progenitor is the French modernist architect Le Corbusier. “I think a lot of it was disliked. I would be sufficiently objective to say that mine might have been a bad generation for architecture.”

“Isn’t that partly to do with the utopian impulses?” I propose.

“Yes, although I don’t know how you see it but I interpret utopianism as something very positive.”

Which takes us back to Bacon and that thing of piling one continuous accident on top of another. It is a trait common to all cities, something that is both necessary and inevitable. Although in Joburg, at the moment, it just seems a little more pronounced, the city’s highways simply a part – rather than apart – from the compounded mess. But this is just a thought, not a definitive proposition. If the process by which a city grows is evolutionary, gradual, so too must all thought be on it.

The evolutionary metaphor here is intentional. While driving to see Bridge 6, we encountered another piece of sculptural art. Situated on the corner of Eloff and Stott, next to the Faraday Market, at an onramp onto the M2, this grubby little office building, now a low-income residence, teasingly popped into view every so often. Its defining feature: the plant life cling to, and sometimes growing out of the brickwork.

“Gee, that building was quite a landmark,” remarks Chipkin the first time we pass it. “I wonder why it went like that. I suppose the owners abandoned it.”

The second time: “Look at that building! Phew. Look at the moss. There can’t be too many cities outside Africa that allow that.”

“You know, that is becoming one of the greatest buildings in Johannesburg,” he says on our final encounter, as we join the highway and speed off west. “It’s utterly amazing, how the decay and the shutters have fallen in the most wonderful sort of vague pattern. Ah, you have got to come back with me here.”

(This article appeared in Empire, July 2008, Vol 1.6)