OUT of all the colours of the rainbow available to them, City Lodge Hotels chose to go with bland for their new beachfront hotel in Port Elizabeth.
Officially a Town Lodge in the “family” of accommodation facilities the group offers, the hotel should have nestled proudly on Nelson Mandela Bay’s beachfront. This is, after all, one of our major attributes.
Instead it sticks out like a sore thumb. There’s lots of facebrick, interspersed with vertical lines of browny-orange and off-white painted surfaces – I’m told it’s a light terracotta, alongside light and dark greys.
It presents a view from Beach Road suggestive of an electrical substation.
An opportunity to create a bright and cheerful new South African building on the beachfront just washed away and we got an image that won’t easily be used on postcards from the Bay.
When I first saw the hotel in its “almost finished” mode, I thought “Eben Donges-goes- swimming”. Imagine relocating the large North End building to the beachfront; it’s appalling enough as a reflection of someone’s sense of aesthetics from so many decades ago. As a memory – for me – of South African history, it’s a terrible feature (an Eben Donges lookalike) to have in such a prime spot on the beachfront. Because architecture is fundamentally reflective of the physical and social environments we find ourselves in at any one time, the kind of buildings which were built during the era – and in honour – of the strong men of apartheid, reflected their impact in dramatic ways.
And once the image is inside my head, I can’t get rid of it.
If this design fits in with the group’s corporate image, as some I spoke to suggest, then it’s really quite a shame. Perhaps some designers don’t get that, or they wimp out when a client insists they must go back to the drawing board.
That’s certainly not the case with Town Lodge architect Jeremy Malan, who tells me from Pretoria the final design of his building must be seen within the context of the constraints that exist – whether in terms of municipal policy, the substrata of the site, busy traffic on a six-lane road or the internal template that hotels must adhere to.
He stresses – and I have every reason to accept – that much design work has gone into the development, from the “podium” on which the structure sits through to the windows which overlook the bay.
Someone asked me if I had been inside, because it’s quite impressive. I haven’t been inside and I don’t doubt it’s impressive all the way through. I can only imagine that sitting inside overlooking this stunning bay has to be a great experience.
And you definitely won’t be wondering what colour the walls outside are painted. But, even though I wish the City Lodge group everything of the best in attracting local and foreign tourists to the bay, that’s not the point.
It’s about how much value these buildings – including the Radisson up the road – add to the aesthetics of our beachfront, for all of us, those who live here as well as those passing through. That value is not discounted by the economic or job-creation impact these investments have in a depressed city like ours.
Malan believes much has been done and they’ve succeeded in “softening the dull monolithic facade” through introducing, inter alia, the facebrick and painted surfaces. It’s here that he loses me, though, as I’m not sure we’ve not ended up with a “dull monolithic facade”.
And, I think we could have avoided having to look on something like that for the next 50 years or more that the structure will be with us.
Our challenge today is less about changing names on buildings and streets, but about developing our cities to reflect the psycho-socio- ecological revolutions we are living through since 1994. Those revolutions are taking place in Africa – yes, at the bottom end of the continent, but in Africa still. Development of our cities must acknowledge and affirm all of this.
Current town planning and building approval processes along the beachfront need to be beefed up – through, for example, introducing a municipal aesthetics committee as in former times, or having mandatory public participation processes. This will ensure even a city such as ours, which too often is seen as the Cinderella of the country when it comes to private sector investment, does not end up giving away the family treasures, even when we may be pretty desperate for some suitor to come along and invite us to the ball.
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