TRANSCRIPT: JUSTICE UNDER A TREE
We were all meeting for the first time as the newly appointed judges of the Constitutional Court. I think that evening there was a dinner, and Arthur Chaskalson spoke, and he mentioned the fact that we were in temporary accommodation. We couldn’t postpone constitutional justice because we didn’t have a building. It was a completely new court. Parliament was Parliament. It just had new occupants. The Union Buildings – happened to have new occupants. But there wasn’t a constitutional court. So, we rented out some office space in Braam Park in Braamfontein. And Arthur announced that we would build a permanent structure for the Constitutional Court. And we set up a small team. It was we judges, today it might be called overreach, but we decided, we’re going to choose the site for our new building. Johannesburg was chosen because half the legal practitioners in the country were in Johannesburg. And it had been left out in the 1910 settlement to placate the Boers who wanted Pretoria, and the colonists who wanted Cape Town. And now Johannesburg was indicated as the place where the Constitutional Court should be.
I think we were given something like eleven different sites to look at. Midrand were very keen. And they said they would fly us around in a helicopter. And I just imagined if that crashed, the whole Constitutional Court would go. A good site, halfway to Pretoria. But it would have been cheek and jowl with the corporate world. And imagine unions and workers and poor farmers and so on coming there to have their fundamental rights upheld and feeling: we’re in foreign territory. So, we said thank you but no thank you. The old Post Office building in downtown Joburg, wonderful old building but it didn’t have the facilities. And a court needs space. It needs some air around it. And this was crowded in by other buildings. And we were shown a site halfway to Soweto, very well placed symbolically but it would have been surrounded by commercial projects. It would have been isolated. There was something unreal about that site.
And then we were taken to the Old Fort prison, Braamfontein, derelict, weeds everywhere, run down. Yes, yes, yes! Johann Kriegler and I knew straight away. The location couldn’t have been better. It’s part of the city. It actually links up Hillbrow, possibly the most African city in Africa, people from all over the continent there. Overcrowded, problematic, dynamic. The northern suburbs. Not a poor person in sight. And round the other side, bureaucratic Braamfontein. Three cities, three worlds that normally are kept apart. The court would respond to all three, bring them together.
But above all, Johann and I – and ultimately with the support of all our colleagues – felt there’s so much history in the Fort Prison. Our leaders had been locked up there. In 1914, the leaders of the Boer resistance, Generaal De Wet, he’d been locked up there. In the 1890s, when it’d been set up, Paul Kruger had locked up the Brits after the Jameson Raid briefly there. The Brits won the Anglo Boer War, they locked up the Boers. People were executed there. They were hanged for treason, Afrikaners. The Mineworkers’ Strike, people locked up there in ‘46. The Treason Trialists locked up there in ’56. Oliver Tambo, the moment he arrived, setting up a choir. It was so resonant with our history. The idea of having a court on that site represented transforming negativity into positivity. And we just knew it had to be, had to be there. That immersion of being on what then became Constitution Hill. I suggested it be called Freedom Hill. Arthur said, ‘No, let’s call it Constitution Hill.’ And that was good, because freedom is a much more generic term and wouldn’t have given it the specificity that it has today. And all eleven judges agreed.
I’d been friendly in the struggle days with Jack Barnett, one of the most brilliant architects in South Africa, who’d actually been detained in the State of Emergency in 1960, very much supporting the underground, the resistance and a brilliant architect. And he said, ‘Albie, you must have a competition.’ He said, ‘If you don’t, Public Works will choose their pals who are often very mediocre, and you’ll get a mediocre building.’ He wanted an excellent building. And so, we had an international competition. And in working out our brief, we stressed very strongly: we wanted a building that would not be overpowering, that would not represent the power of the state, but that would be welcoming, that would be friendly and that all South Africans could identify with.
The jury was so interesting, because we had Geoffrey Bawa from Sri Lanka and Charles Correa from India – so that there would be a third world vision, not a northern Europe, North American vision. And the editor of the British Architectural Review named Peter Davey. And then we had the mayor of Johannesburg, Isaac Mogase, who said he’d been locked up in Number 4 Prison. He said, if he had told the warders that one day he’d be the mayor of Johannesburg awarding the contract to the winning architects for a Constitutional Court building, he said they would have killed him. I was asked to represent the court.
And Thenji Mtintso was put on at the last minute. She said, ‘Why do you put me on? What do I know about buildings and architecture? You saw there were only men!’ She was quite right. She became the most influential member of the jury. She said, ‘My mother is going to the Constitutional Court.’ Her mother: a domestic worker, not much schooling. Her mother: terrified of buildings in Johannesburg, feeling she has to go around the back. And she said, ‘When my mother comes to the Constitutional Court, will the face of the court be smiling or will it be frowning?’ She said, ‘I like that project.’ And it so happened Albie liked that project. And Isaac Mogase liked that project. We couldn’t read plans, but we liked the philosophy of a justice under a tree. It just had that warmth and welcome and a kind of South African – today we would say ‘decolonised’ – feel.
It was fantastic for us having Nelson Mandela announce the winner of the competition. And of course, that was done inside the prison. And he gets up and he says, ‘The winner of the competition is…’ And he takes a glass of water, puts it down, opens it. ‘The winner is…’ And then announces: ‘Design Workshop and Urban Solutions of Johannesburg.’ And they didn’t know until then that they’d been chosen. And so young architects from Durban and a young town planner from Johannesburg come forward and they’re all elated and smiles all round.
Before the competition and the appointment of the winning architects, we’d been helped enormously by two academics at the school of Architecture at the University of Cape Town. And we went up to Constitution Hill. We walked around and they said, ‘There’s no space for a building. And you can’t build the court on top of the existing buildings, the logic is just so different.’ So,they said, ‘We can keep the Fort itself. We can keep the Women’s Jail. We can keep the Number 4 Prison – that was the notorious hell hole. But the Awaiting Trial Block would have to be demolished.’ So. when it came to knocking down the Awaiting Trial Block, it was very painful. The Monuments Commission were not happy about that. But they realised there’d be no space for a court, an independent building. There’d be no open space in front to symbolise the independence of the court. But the decision was taken by the architects. And the bricks of the Awaiting Trial Block could be used for paving the square that would be in front and used for cladding inside the building.
Then, a very interesting engineering problem gave rise to a very productive outcome. The original plan was to have a huge canopy, concrete canopy, over the court chamber, the administration area, the library. But they found it would be almost impossible to achieve technically. So, they decided instead to keep the staircases – there were four staircases in the Awaiting Trial Block – to keep them in place. And they became like sentinels. So, although we had to destroy one of the most precious buildings, we recycled both physically the fabric but also in terms of memory. And integrated the past into the future in that very, very symbolical and powerful physical way. So, you go into the foyer now and you’ll see the staircase which the prisoners – you never move slowly in prison [imitates sound]. It’s always shouting. You had all the time in the world, but shouting was the order of the day, up and down those stairs. And the graffiti are still on there. Some of the original graffiti are still on there. And behind the bench where the judges sit, you see the bricks that belonged to the Awaiting Trial Block.
The court became heavily involved in the project. I remember Laurie Ackermann would get out a slide rule and look at the design. And was the arc of the bench just right where counsel would be standing and addressing us? He was always very methodical and meticulous. We were heavily involved in the concept of the judges’ chambers. I, much more in the general shape and feeling and quality of the place. I with the artwork. We set up an artworks committee. And they said, ‘Albie, you can have your artwork in the foyers and everywhere else but not in the court chamber.’ I said, ‘Why, you want people to look at us and not at the artwork?’ They said, ‘No.’ And maybe they were right. We were thinking of the Marlene Dumas figures being very dramatic. But they said no. And the most interesting artworks were not the pieces of what I call loose art – the sculptures, the tapestries, the paintings – but the integrated artwork. The doors, the chandeliers, the carpets. We asked for soft curtaining. We asked for colour. We didn’t want the court to be stiff and austere and cold like most courts were with wooden panels. We wanted it to be warm and embracing. And we had competitions for all of these different features, all of which go to make up the particular quality of the building and that sense of justice under a tree. Not justice in a refrigerator with artificial illumination, artificial cooling and heating. But justice in a people friendly kind of a building.
