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MenuHomeUpfront Now Up Books Towns Structures People Firms Lexicon | FELDMAN, MannieBorn: fl 1951Died: 2007 ArchitectSACA:Reg No: 1354 Year registered: 1951 | |||||||||||
BArch (Witwatersrand) In 1959 his address was, 8th Floor, Management House, cor. Stiemens and Melle Streets, Braamfontein, Johannesburg. (Transvaal Inst. practicing. ISAA Yearbook, 1959). Obituary To remember Mannie Feldman is to celebrate life, to recall bubbling humour and to review a complex architecture.He came out of the milieu of a large extended family that promoted learning and produced among its members musicians, artists, activists and two going on three - generations of architects. Irma Stern's 1927 portrait of Richard and Ray Feldman provides us with a glimpse of this cultural richness. Mannie, in fact, initially saw himself as a violinist but turned to architecture as an ex-serviceman after World War Two, where he had served as a navigator in the SAAF stationed in Egypt and Italy. He was born in 1924, the son of an overworked medical officer in Vereeniging. When Mannie was six, the family travelled to Vienna, Austria, to enable his father to specialise. On the return journey from Southampton a passenger on board asked: 'Now that you've seen the great cities of the world which do you like best?' The reply was characteristic Feldman, 'Vereeniging is best.' In 1948, when Israel was in danger, he volunteered for the Israeli Air Force - newly formed with outdated aircraft, with anything that could be made to fly. He related that during sorties he would lean over the side of the cockpit to drop bombs by hand. But his cultural bias was African. Africa was in his mind from an early age when he paged through old books illustrating the rich diversity of African architecture and sculpture, hinting at the flowering genius of the continent. My own identity with an African feeling was influenced by Feldman when I first met him in 1960. In the Yiddish school in Sydenham (1962), inspired modernity was derived from the modular design of the new English post-war schools. But the richness of serrated brick patterning and terracotta grilles was something not seen overseas. In addition the school was a focus for an outpouring of joyous energy; the jagged, spiky entrance sculpture in concrete was by Feldman himself, and the brilliant off-cut tile mural was by Harold Rubin. In this domestic scale work, there was always an integration of art, sculpture and architecture. There was a further quality: the house as a setting for music. In his own family home on Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood (1957), the walls - bagged with hand sweeps like rustic houses on the veld - had an interior animated by Arne Jacobsen dining chairs, a small folding chair from the Congo and later an erotic totem sculpture from Central Africa. There was also a raised platform for recitals of voice, viola and piano. This was specifically for his wife Anne, an eminent soprano who trained the Soweto choir famous for its Messiah recitals. In Feldman's high-rise work, other imperatives operated. Like Erno Goldfinger, in whose London office he worked after graduating in 1950, Feldman saw large-scale architecture as sculpture, expressing strong ideas and making powerful statements. Feldman read the African context in a particular way: as a vast continent-size landscape requiring bold interventions. This lead to the Hongkongisation at Ponte in Hillbrow (1972-1975), appropriate for an architect who would work in Hong Kong and appropriate for a building known for a while as Le Petit Kinshasa. Denis Kadima from Lumumbashi, and now director of the Electoral Institution of Southern Africa, remembers the building from this time when for him it was the modernness of a new world. I look beyond the criticism of Ponte [Building] that has appeared since it fell into decay to an alternative conclusion in a forthcoming book. Virtually no view of greater Johannesburg is devoid of Ponte. At night the building is haunting and spectacular, and it provides the urban climax one subconsciously yearns for. The Nedbank Building (1970) on Albert Street, off of Eloff, has a narrow street entrance, a triple-volume space with stairs forming a three-dimensional sculpture, black metal relief panels to dramatise height and splay-cut lighting cubes of varying heights in red and yellow. Everything in Mannie's hands assumed a sculptural presence. Again, the Metal Box building (another 1970s classic) in Milpark is pure Feldman: an explosion of multi-level space seen from the shopping gallery below, with a folded black anodised aluminium wall sculpture at the entrance. Or in the showroom building on Pritchard Street from the 1960s: the cantilevered stairs rising off a honey-coloured chamfuti parquet floor commands the space as a sculptural focus. Feldman devoted the last decade to developing flexible housing types for mass housing. This resulted in five or six volumes showing hundreds of alternatives based on a lifetime of experience. Designing and drawing to the end. Hamba Kahle. Good bye. (CHIPKIN, Clive. 2007 (November/December). 'Mannie Feldman'. Architecture SA Journal of the South African Institute of Architects p52). List of projects With photographs With notes
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