Home Upfront Now Up Books Towns Structures People Firms Lexicon		Eaton's faggots : the Netherlands Bank Building, Pretoria _____________________________________________________ Author: Wegelin, Hans In: Architecture SA Vol 89, Issue 9, Sep Date: 1992 _____________________________________________________
Norman Eaton was renowned for his handling of stone, wood, terra cotta and above all bricks. For the Netherlands Bank Building he had three special brick types made to clad the concrete cellular structure around the windows of the first to the fifth storey. Two of these special bricks were reeded faggots, giving the window cells a finer texture and smaller scale. They are fixed to the concrete frame with wire ties cast into the concrete and bedded into the joints between the faggots. The third type was a chamfered unit, more like a tile, which gives deep and narrow horizontal recesses below the window cill. The rest of the structure is clad in a klompie—225x85x33 mm, laid with mortarless perpends, and a pattern of slightly recessed bricks. It is not clear whether the brick exterior was demanded by the Hollanders, to be associated with the traditional finishes of their country, (A.L Meiring, who started off with Eaton on the project and had prepared the perspective of the design that was submitted to the owners during lunch at the Pretoria Country Club, is on record as having said that the Hollanders did not like the bricks at all, adding that Holland had too much of it already!), or whether Eaton had set his mind on it from the start. It is interesting to note that his close friend Alexis Preller has suggested that Eaton's later use of small scale "faggotting" in terra cotta tiling is to be sought in his appreciation of ancient Egyptian ceramic tiling, making the visual quality of this building more peculiar to the African Continent. The cladding has stood up well over nearly forty years, and, apart from unsensitively placed signage on the corner of the building and over the entrances, the building seems to be in good shape.
Buildings linked to this article Netherlands Bank: Bank of Netherlands - Nedbank, 1953, Pretoria Central, Tshwane (Pretoria), Gauteng. pp