Building follies to man’s egotistical folly

For about two years now my apartment block has become a hub of TikTok-induced frenzy. Every day and multiple times on a Sunday the street outside is full of glowing youth in various states of dress and undress strutting, singing, standing fetchingly with balloons (oh so many balloons) and generally “signifying”.

What happened to create this sudden wave of scene-setting popularity is not entirely clear. Someone must have started it, but what I can say for a fact is that it's not going away. There is a constant stream of posers per pavement, or as the Instagram account would have it “Influencers in the Wild”, or in this case The Wild’s adjacent, because Whitehall Court is in Killarney, close to the 40 acre park on the edge of downtown Johannesburg.

On Saturday we, the inhabitants of TikTok central, had our own little ceremony and posed for posterity in front of the building so we could give our abode its due. We finally emblazoned it with a blue plaque from Joburg Heritage. Whitehall Court is now officially a monument, 99 years old and counting.

I'm not entirely sure what took so long — probably because once you're a heritage site you can't do as you please with your property and that may have been part of the previous resistance. People are prone to decorative freedom when it comes to their homes. There's no accounting for taste, and I suspect nobody wants to be told what counts as good or not. 

There’s magic in these walls. It’s the kind that comes with an unlimited budget and a deep desire to live as you please — à la mode in this case

There was singing from the parapets and lights strung from the glorious balconies that look on to the central courtyard where the garden bloomed spectacularly, white roses everywhere, and just outside, the Jacarandas enveloped the stately building in a heady purple haze. Everyone was united in the overriding idea of the place — which is that it's supreme luck to find pockets of beauty and sanctuary in our hard-knock town and they must be celebrated.

The chap who built the place was one Ian Schlesinger. He built it as a private residence in the 1920s (and called it The Ritz) around the corner from his film studios, which is where the Killarney Mall squats. So that should tell you everything . The style of the architecture is French Chateau via the Riviera meets English baronial estate meets Hollywood. There's a tower, there are pavilions on the roof for parties at sunset, there's an elevator of the old school variety, and at least two ghosts. There's magic in these walls. It’s the kind that comes with an unlimited budget and a deep desire to live as you please — à la mode in this case.

I picture Schlesinger in the guise of a sub-equatorial Citizen Kane — he was a man of his time — an American in Africa building his very own Xanadu down south. It’s a fantasy, a pastiche but with a veneer of respectability, because it is, indeed, beautiful. Cue TikTok. The huge double archway for the horse-drawn carriages is the most Hollywood of effects. After all, the 1920s are all about peak automobile, but we must have stables for the horses, darling.

Citizen Kane is Donald Trump’s favourite film and the parallels are obvious. A guy inherits a lot of cash and proceeds to build his brand. He succeeds, on the name recognition front, to become the most famous chap in the world. Kane was a composite of several huge money figures of the early 20th century — William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer and others just like them. Of course, the story is a tragic tale of hubris. Hearst issued instructions that the film should never be mentioned in his newspapers. Who can blame him? In the film he dies alone in his overblown fantasy of a house surrounded by piles of insanely expensive stuff, like a pharaoh in an overblown tomb. Trump, at least, rents out rooms in his 1920s pleasure palace, Mar-a-Lago. I cannot say how Schlesinger died. The building was eventually sold and the new owners sectional titled it so t we too get to live the fantasy.

Every man deserves his castle. There's the guy in Hyde Park with the supersized collection of cement baroque statuary of ancient Greek gods all over the walls of his temple raised in honour of his personal vision of grandeur. The Guptas left their own paeans to their taste in Saxonwold. Russian President Vladimir Putin has his winter palace in Sochi, the size of a medium sized village, with his wonderful underground aqua discoteca and a regular supply of mermaids. The world is dotted with palaces of every size and description that once housed the rich and powerful visionaries who built them. Outside Buckingham Palace people pose in throngs to mark the fact that they too stood outside the bloated example of late British Empire statement architecture. 

I'm reading about the recent foray of the Romanian Roma into fixed abodes. Until 1856 most of the nomads from 14th century India had been enslaved. Adolf Hitler did his best to wipe out the rest of them, but they live on and have made a lot of hard cash in a multiplicity of ways. They've done what we tend to do once we hit a certain level of fiscal largesse: build castles to our fancies. Some, namely their hapless neighbours, say the follies with crenellated roofs, elaborate staircases to nowhere, mausoleums, Capitol Hill golden-domed inspirations taking their architectural lead from the dollar bill, are testament to bad taste and the horrors of newly emboldened nomads putting down roots. Who’s to say? I watch Bridgerton and Downtown Abbey and see mammoth testaments to British Imperialism writ large across swathes of British countryside and wonder why we all sigh with delight at the upstairs-downstairs mess of it all. What are those manors if not big entitled fictions?

The impulse to build a castle is strong with everyone. I had to leave the Killarney WhatsApp group to avoid contending with the trauma of reading the insane commentary about the gentleman who's built his castle outside the Nelson Mandela Children’s Foundation. I don’t know how I feel about it, except marvel at his ever-expanding empire on the corner of Oxford and the Wolds. He had the best view of the angel monument at the War Museum and was planning a second floor extension. Some official-looking people regularly intervened in his building project and took it down, but by the next morning he was back with blinds and a vengeance, until they laid down huge rocks. The foundation sent a letter saying it wasn't them. He's on the other side of the road but hasn't broken ground yet.