History

Johannesburg owes its existence to gold. The main Witwatersrand reef was identified in the mid-1880s, and the city was established in 1886 to serve the rush that followed. Unlike older colonial centres, it had no slow founding period: it was a mining town that became a metropolis within a single generation. By the early twentieth century the wealth pulled out of the deep-level mines had concentrated in a tight grid of streets south of the Witwatersrand ridge, and that concentration of capital set the stage for the building boom that defined the city’s first true skyline.

The decisive decade was the 1930s. As the gold price held firm through the years of the global Depression, Johannesburg kept building while many cities abroad had stalled. Developers and architects looked outward for a model — and they looked, above all, to the United States. Astor Mansions, designed in 1931 by the firm Obel and Obel and completed in 1932, made the reference explicit: its curved zigzag crown openly recalls the Chrysler Building in New York, and even its name nodded to the Waldorf Astoria. At 102 metres and eleven floors it became, briefly, the tallest building in Johannesburg.

That title passed in 1937 to Anstey’s Building, begun in 1935 by the architects Emley & Williamson. Conceived as a department store with apartments above, it rose to twenty storeys and seventy-seven metres. Where Astor Mansions borrowed a New York crown, Anstey’s borrowed New York massing: a stepped, recessed tower that climbed in stages away from the street. These two buildings, more than any others, fixed the Art Déco character of the Johannesburg CBD.