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MenuHomeUpfront Now Up Books Towns Structures People Firms Lexicon | GRAFF, Elias Isaiah (Jummy)Born: fl 1948ArchitectSACA:Reg No: 1206 Year registered: 1950 | |||||
BArch (Witwatersrand), ARIBA, ISAA, TPIA. ’At the beginning of the 1950s Graff was in England for eighteen months. In this period he worked for a while in the office of Misha Black, one of the design architects of the Festival of Britain. In England he was attracted to the human scale of buildings, particularly in Wren’s work. He was impressed ''by the orderly nature of the architecture, the sense of consistency and continuity’’. Overall the ''good manners’’ of British architecture appealed to him. And this is exactly the quality one finds in Graff’s early work. There is a neat, crisp quality to his low-profile architecture, an oeuvre of well-mannered, well-proportioned buildings filled with English reticence’ (Chipkin 1993:252). In 1953 he won the competition for the new Uganda Electricity Board Building in Kampala, later called ‘Amber House’, adjudicated by Norman HANSON. Graff had worked for HANSON in his fourth year of study, ''a sobering experience, the equivalent of a cold-shower’'He graduated from the Witwatersrand School of Architecture in 1958. In 1959 he was a partner in MOROSS and GRAFF at 405 M.B.S. Buildings, c/o Wolmarans and Simmonds Streets, (Box 10506), Johannesburg. 'Essentially a pragmatist, unattached to theoretical positions or utopian visions.' An efficient producer of buildings - well planned, soundly constructed and spacially organised with flair. He, unlike his Wits compatriots, felt more at home with Frank Lloyd Wright than Le Corbusier. He gravitated naturally to London in 1950 and returned with his design aesthetic heavily influenced by British modernism with its 'good manners' and Swedish bias.' He had a flair for competitions and in the partnership was often placed or premiated. He is recalled as '... a quiet man yet you always felt his presence’. (Chipkin, 2008: 250-255).GRAFF came up with the innovation of covering IBR troughs with a lay-on ceramic tile, called 'Britti Tiles,' this both for aesthetic reasons as well as to circumvent by-laws where the use of galvanized sheetmetal as roofing material was prohibited this in itself a 'snob-value' restriction to meet the sensibilities of 'up-market' neighbourhoods! In 1969 recorded as at c/o Eloff and Smit Streets, Braamfontein, Johannesburg. All truncated references not fully cited in 'References' are those of Joanna Walker's original text and cited in full in the 'Bibliography' entry of the Lexicon. Books citing GRAFF
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