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Early Architects of South Africa
Introduction
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Glossary of Terms
Background
Disclaimer
The ARCHITECTS NAMES were established by various means, apparent from the bibliographic references.
BUILDINGS are found under the name/purpose for which they were first constructed, e.g the Tower House' (Grahamstown) will have the NAME 'Tower House', it is now the Observatory Museum, this current name will be found under ALTERNATE NAME. Few buildings are included on attribution only. The dictionary is thus architect's name driven and not primarily building driven.
PLACE names were taken from the texts used; the spelling has sometimes needed to be made 'current'. But post-1940 name changes have not been adopted, for instance the former Homelands name changes have not been used, Mafeking not becoming Mafikeng, etc. This is more noticeable when it comes to Zimbabwean name changes. Where possible it has been made clear what the current name is. The reason for this is purely historicist.
DATES: Dates given: 1896-1956 denote a known birth and death date or established building date/s. fl.1890-1902 indicates the date/s an architect is known to have been active in South Africa. The circa: c1800 is an approximate date; ?1800: a query date where the date cannot be said to be approximate. When the architect is not known to be dead (under 100 years) a hyphen is used, e.g. Brown, A 1912 - Sometimes however the following dating is used '1901 - after 1933' when nothing further is known of the architect after 1933; ?-1967 is used to indicate that an approximate age of the architect cannot be established; c1895-1977 is given when for instance, it is known that the architect finished articles in 1917, it being guessed that it was likely the architect was about 23 years old on completion of articles.
A few SOURCES will prove a problem: RAU doc (Rand Afrikaans University documentation) stored in the former History of Art Department. The department has closed and it not known what has happened to the documents. HSRC papers were collected when the Institute for Languages and Arts was in existence (IRLA). The architectural documentation remains in the HSRC under the curatorship of Dr GM van der Waal: this is where 'personal communication' can be found under the name of the specific architect.
THE FUTURE. What is crucial is that collection and storage of documents relating to South African buildings and architects should be officially on-going and a centre established where the material can be stored and studied, the work in this dictionary providing a sound base on which to build an extraordinary data-base which should be extended to include work throughout Africa.
Disclaimer
This database is a working draft and includes inaccuracies and omissions. SAHRA does not take any responsibility for the quality of data held in this database. SAHRA is not liable for any actions taken or not taken based on information held in or omitted from this database.
