Today, the platonic forms of the modernist, Corbusian-inspired Werdmuller Centre, by South African architect and urban designer Roelof Uytenbogaardt, stand against a background of decay in a neglected corner of Claremont, Cape Town. Controversial ever since its construction in the 1970s, the building is again the vortex of a dispute. It has been subject to a process of consideration for “heritage worthiness”, drawing public attention in the post-colonial, post-apartheid present to the contemporary significance of Uytenbogaardt’s work. Cape Town has been nominated World Design Capital in 2014, and the Werdmuller Centre, standing almost in ruins, exemplifies many of the tensions that exist over the presence of modernist design and buildings in the contemporary city. Occupying a site considered to have commercial development potential by its owners, its proposed demolition is opposed by architects who argue that the Werdmuller Centre deserves to be classified as “heritage”. As the building’s future hangs in the balance, the debates that have emerged since the announcement of intentions to demolish have become heightened in 2013, revealing the contested nature of modern architecture in post-apartheid South Africa.

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This paper contributes to the deliberations around the future of modernist architecture in the Modern Heritage of Africa (MoHoA) initiative. As creative practitioners and academics, our work has focused on considerations of architecture and urbanism, variously designing, theorizing, and photographing cities and structures. Our work is very much a critique of architectural photography, an approach to visualizing and thinking about cities that is analytical. Our collaborative work is set in dialogue with conventional forms of architectural scholarship and photography. For 12 years we have been working to examine the questions of ‘apartheid's modernities’. Our current project is to document architect Roelof S. Uytenbogaardt's buildings. Uytenbogaardt died in the late 1990s. His papers are lodged at UCT Libraries' Department of Manuscripts and Archives. We have been collecting and constructing our own archive and have recorded a large percentage of Uytenbogaardt's public buildings, projects and sites in South Africa.

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