Sir Herbert Baker | Pushing presidents onto a higher plane

The young Herbert Baker and his brother Lionel sailed from England to Cape Town in 1892. The South Africa that the Norham Castle steamed towards was in the throes of dramatic colonial expansion. There can be little doubt that for the brothers, their quest was not entirely commercial but was also strongly tinged with imperial idealism.

On their arrival the brothers made straight for Admiralty House in Simon’s Town where they were warmly welcomed by an elder cousin, Rear Admiral Nicholson, and his wife. It was here that they spent their first weeks on the Cape, overlooking False Bay where the British naval ships were anchored. As new arrivals they were entertained and introduced to the society of Cape Town and one evening, having been invited to dinner by Lewis Vintcent, a member of the Cape House of Assembly — to his utter astonishment — Herbert found himself seated directly opposite Cecil Rhodes. As he later recounted: “I sat entranced at their talk on South Africa and world affairs, but I said little or nothing, and went away much discomforted at having proved myself so unable to make the most of this golden opportunity.”

Baker’s first client in Cape Town was a member of Cecil Rhodes’ cabinet, James Rose Innes, who commissioned a small addition to the reformatory in Tokai. Further projects trickled in — a small observatory for the roof of the government buildings in Pretoria, then the first buildings of Wynberg Boys’ High School.

On the back of these commissions, Baker established his first South African office in what must have been an astonishingly hot, little glazed turret on the flat roof of an old house at 43 St George’s Street, which had previously been used as an uitkyk or lookout for ships, from where he could both survey the ships arriving and departing in the bay below and also revel in the ever-changing moods and “almost religious feeling “of the great Table Mountain above him. In October, he received his first new house commission, for a Mr J B Moffat. Only a photograph survives of the house, which shows a rendered two-storey detached villa with sliding sash windows — all in all a rather inoffensive seaside Queen Anne which would be more at home in Torquay than on its plot in Tokai.

This raises an important point as we chart Baker’s architectural development through the next few years, namely that, despite his considerable practical experience, he had next to no design experience beyond his student projects, and these early commissions in South Africa therefore represented the first real buildings that he had produced under his own name. Baker’s design experience up until 1892 was restricted almost entirely to matters of detail. He was an award-winning student, but only in his professional practice examination, and for a man who liked to listen more than talk, he now had to express himself in three dimensions in public for the first time and to develop an architecture of his own, incorporating his already well-developed architectural theories and beliefs.

It was hardly surprising that he initially fell back on tried-and-tested solutions, only slowly introducing innovation as his confidence began to grow. Fortunately, his workload quickly began to build, thus providing him with opportunities to experiment, but sadly, most of these, including Linkoping for a Dr Smuts and a further detached Hopetown House for Alex Bell, were in the same unremarkable English suburban villa style as Mr Moffat’s house.

But fate was about to intervene in a way that would not only transform his immediate prospects but, even more significantly, offer him the potential to become one of the leading architects of his generation. Baker had continued his normal regime of early-morning walks before the heat of the day; it was on one of these that he met Rhodes and Hans Sauer returning from their early-morning ride on the Cape Flats. In Baker’s own words: “He stopped and asked me to breakfast the next morning, as he wanted me, he said, to ‘build his house’. This happy meeting and invitation determined my fortune.”

[Rhodes] stopped and asked me to breakfast the next morning, as he wanted me, he said, to ‘build his house’. This happy meeting and invitation determined my fortune

“His house” was Groote Schuur — a large farmhouse, previously owned by an early Dutch governor, which Rhodes had been renting and planned to buy, and which he now wished to restore and extend. 

The Union Buildings

Herbert disembarked at Cape Town on April 29 1913. He had been away for five months during which time he had visited London and Rome twice and India for the first time. He returned with his appointment as one of the two principal architects for the construction of the new imperial city of Delhi secured and his position as one of the leaders of his profession much enhanced. Confident that he had made a positive contribution to the final resolution of the city plan, he now returned to his South African practice and the completion of perhaps his greatest architectural achievement — the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Florence’s [Herbert's wife] letter to her father, of the following day, picks up our tale:

Herbert returned to us safely yesterday morning & it is delightful to have him back. He looks very well I think & none the worse for 70 days of ship board. We are so busy picking up the threads of five months. Unfortunately, he had to dash off by the 8.40 train to the town this morning and we know not when he will be back.

He is to interview Gen Smuts at 11, Murray 11.30 Head of the Public Works Depart. Lunch Lady Phillips so we do not know when to expect him here. I wish he could have had one more day of peace with the boys. We three met him at the station at 10. Allaire was very quiet at first but soon became as cheeky and jolly as Henry. Five months is a long time at 4½ & they in half an hour had inveigled Herbert into their huge sand cave & buried him up to the neck in sand. I took a snapshot of the architect of Delhi which I shall send you in great glee ... It is lovely to have him back for even a precious five months tho’ our future looks full of meetings and partings.

Florence’s excitement and pride at Herbert’s appointment for New Delhi was undimmed and compensated to a degree for the dawning realisation that his success would mean many months apart each year, for many years to come. For Herbert, the Secretariat buildings at New Delhi represented a huge and prestigious new commission, but he had by no means forgotten his existing clients with his first meeting after arriving home in South Africa being with Smuts to reassure him that the completion of his Union Buildings was now his principal focus.

By early May he was on-site in Pretoria witnessing six months’ worth of progress since his last visit. The buildings were all but complete now and he was personally able to oversee the completion of the terraces and amphitheatre, the design of which he had been refining during his travels.

The Union Buildings were both the crowning achievement of Baker’s career in South Africa and a fitting finale to this hugely important period in his life. Building by building since his arrival 20 years earlier, he had developed as an architect, improved his ability as a designer, encouraged local artists and craftsmen to assist him in his work, built a team of extremely capable assistants around him, provided professional leadership and training for the first time in the region and delivered an astonishing range and quantity of outstanding buildings while earning the universal respect of the local mine owners, industrialists and politicians of various camps.

He had developed an architectural approach that was responsive to the extremes of the climate, sensitive to local vernacular traditions and, with his later public work in particular, expressive of the beliefs that he and his clients shared. For him, the Union Buildings were in many ways a second Rhodes Memorial — a celebration of the achievement of Rhodes’ vision of a united South Africa under British rule — a symbol of both the might of the empire and its edifying influence.

Its site, which he had selected, allowed this symbol of government to be raised above the city, dominating it visually and creating a higher plane for its leaders to occupy in the style of the Acropolis

Painstakingly and fastidiously, inspired by what he had seen first-hand in Italy and Greece, he had moved from his original architectural roots in his cousin’s Gothic, via the Arts and Crafts Movement towards the Classicism of the ancient Mediterranean empires, recognising in it both its potency as an expression of power and its suitability for tempering the searing sun of the colonies, and in the Union Buildings (with assistance from Jones, Wren and Lutyens) he produced his greatest design to date.

Its site, which he had selected, allowed this symbol of government to be raised above the city, dominating it visually and creating a higher plane for its leaders to occupy in the style of the Acropolis in Athens or the Capitoline Hill in Rome. For Baker the view from this government tabula rasa was of equal importance, as it had been for Rhodes on Table Mountain, offering distant views, inspiration and thus encouragement for the leaders of the country to “take the long view”. This was given expression in the great Ionic porticos or loggias to which ministers had direct access from their offices.

The two wings of the building, each with its tower, express the two nations — British and Dutch — brought together in peace to form the new South Africa. They are identical, thus expressing their equality within the new country and now linked by the great curved colonnade enclosing the amphitheatre, itself an ancient symbol of assembly and debate, that sits at the very heart of the complex.

* This is an edited extract from ‘Sir Herbert Baker: A Biography’, by John Stewart, published by Jonathan Ball Publishers