African Modernity

The Simple Forms of This Family Home in Sandton Reflect What Happens When Mid-century Modernism Is Fully Integrated Into an African Context

- Graham Wood

 During the time when Johanne Balfour and her family were building their home in Sandton, Joburg, they rented a house designed by Mid-Century South African architect Norman Eaton. Eaton’s legacy is best summed up as pioneering a kind of Highveld regional modernism – and Johanne, who is French, could not have chosen a more thoughtful, nuanced example of local architecture to shape her family’s own architectural response to their new country.

‘From the start, I wanted to go modern,’ says Johanne, an interior designer who studied at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan and Joburg’s Greenside Design Center. And it was this idea that led her to the ‘tropical modernism’ of contemporary Brazilian architecture, which combines the clean lines and elegance of modernist architecture with textured natural materials and a more expressive approach.

Intent on adapting this influence for her family home’s Highveld setting and melding it with some of the principles that animated Eaton’s architecture in the late mid-20th century, Johanne called on architect Charles van Breda – and the result is a sophisticated version of modern African architecture.

The building comprises a wooden-slatted block resting on top of a glass block, with a concrete block on one end that intersects at 90 degrees. ‘The design crystallised into a very simple form,’ says Van Breda. ‘Effectively, it is a structure floating on another structure, with a glass box below.’ The bedrooms are above and the living areas are glassed in below, configured around the kitchen, which ‘formed the nucleus of the house’. In the concrete block is the garage.