Taking a circuitous and rather rain-swept route on foot across the Foreshore on Monday, I thought about the use over the years to which this piece of land, so painfully reclaimed from the sea, has been put.
One needs a pedestrian’s perspective to comprehend the gigantism which has been the measure of the many architects who have had a hand in building design in the area.
Where there is any limit on land and where buyers and developers are many, there is only one way to go - up.
Which is fine if aesthetic considerations are removed from the equation. And I understand this, having been told on numerous occasions by city planners, architects and developers that, when foreign money comes to Cape Town, “you aesthetes, conservationists and heritage buffs had better just get out of the way”.
If the jobs of thousands of workers is in the balance against a small-scale, human-sized, retro-style buildingscape, then I understand that the employment/ investment argument must always win.
But the question remains, what has been lost in the process of canyonising this special area of the city? As Cheryl Ozinsky wistfully used to say, the connection between land and sea is the most sensitive nexus that mankind has under its control.
Successive Cape Town City Councils’ answer to this has been to allow behemoth blocks to explode into the air, cutting off sea from city and city from mountain.
Solly Morris, city engineer, decreed overhead roadways to fill in the gaps and the result is a city visually divided against itself.
The Foreshore as a result is a lonely place, devoid of walkers, where, the sun being excluded, shade and shadow predominate.
The scale, and in my opinion, the design of so many of the Foreshore buildings, is against their fulfilling most of the functions of successful buildings - for the former extend no invitation to enter, their sides are sheer with minimal setbacks, their myriad windows seem tinted or set so high up that they resist any kind of interaction.
These structures offer no variety, have little individual character and, forbidding, suggest nothing in the way of the human or the intimate.
Thus my chief observation was the absence of other human beings - no shoppers, no idlers, no groups walking from point A to point B.
Occasional newspaper vendors, messengers, car guards to be sure - but it is largely a cityscape bereft of people. And so far removed in this respect from London or New York.
The Foreshore is a place to park your car underground and bury oneself above ground - sometimes 26 storeys high - and, as a place of business, it ranks high in the city
But, as a precinct without soul, Cape Town’s Foreshore stands alone, a part of the muddled, intimate city behind it, but distinctly and regrettably apart.