Architect and Builder February/March 2019 | Page 60

THE DESIGN
‘The International Style’
The world’s first glass and steel skyscrapers
were made real by Mies van der Rohe with his
1958 Seagrams Building in Manhattan and his
1951 Lakeshore Drive Apartments in Chicago.
The black glass box signature became known as
“The International Style” and is a design meme
that has spread to sophisticated global cities,
including Cape Town with Nedbank’s 1968
Foreshore head office. Now reimagined as The
Onyx, the Nedbank building was literally the last
building to be erected on the Heerengracht and
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today still nothing separates this building from the
harbour apart from the Cape Town International
Convention Centre.
Playful & Organic
In crafting these playful and organic interventions
to the existing building the architects, Robert Silke
& Partners, looked to Chicago’s other master
architect, Bertrand Goldberg, who studied under
Mies at the Bauhaus, and whose organic Marina
City twin towers (1962), stand in marked contrast
to Mies’ dogmatically rectilinear IBM Building that
is immediately adjacent. IBM is corporate and
The Onyx