OH11 Barnett Kantorowich Monograph

I’ve never been a fan of face brick. I always thought it is a harsh material. It also has this eerie-municipal quality which I have always disliked. That is until I came across the work of Roy Kantorowich and the magnificent building on the corner Long and Shortmarket Street, called Federate House, which he designed. Kantorowich worked in the 40’s and 50’s and unlike the other modernists obsessed with a streamlined, white plastered aesthetic, he wanted to exploit the durable (and decorative) qualities of face brick to come up with a unique expression. My research showed that he was a mentor to Jack Barnett and it only made sense to show their work in conjunction. Because little is known about Kantorowich, Professor Julian Cooke agreed to sketch a picture of the time in which he worked – an era which he terms as New Empiricism, a post-war rejection of the purity of the Modern Movement aesthetic as propagated by Le Corbusier. Barnett continued with this thinking in the 60’s and 70’s with the Baxter Theatre being his most famous expression of this ethos. In a great essay that Cooke wrote in the 1993’s July August edition of Architecture SA, he writes that the New Empiricists rejected two things of the International Style: one the lack of aesthetic expression beyond motifs and patterns and two, the lack of ‘warmth, richness and human quality that came with the abstract purity of the International Style aesthetic. With this in mind one can understand why the UCT Baxter Women’s residence, built in the 50’s, with its face brick exterior and pitch roofs does not look like your run of the mill Modern Movement building. The courtyard, is however the strongest part of the building as it is here where Kantorowich tried to insert the human quality he thought was lacking in the Modern icons of its day. Photo credits: H Wolff