Brutalism in South Africa

South Africa built extensively in concrete during the 1960s and 1970s, when economic growth funded corporate towers, universities and civic centers, mostly by locally trained architects working in an international brutalist idiom. Johannesburg holds the most famous example: Ponte City (1975), the hollow cylindrical apartment tower by Rodney Grosskopff and Manfred Hermer with Mannie Feldman, long Africa's tallest residential building and an icon of the city's skyline.

University campuses carry much of the rest of this heritage. The Rand Afrikaans University campus, now the University of Johannesburg in Auckland Park, was planned by Wilhelm O. Meyer & Partners as a vast concrete ring, while in Cape Town Roelof Uytenbogaardt designed rigorously sculptural public buildings including the University of Cape Town Sports Centre (1977).