Architect and Builder January/February 2016 | Page 27

two towers. Foundations were cast within the existing
basement and new columns were extended through
the core of the building – punching through the floor
slabs as the columns were extended.

FAÇADE
Exterior Design and Façade
While the building represented a triumph of
precasting on its original completion, the external
finishes, composition of forms and fenestration
had not weathered well and the building had not
aged gracefully.
Renovation was evaluated and weighed against a
range of alternative interventions and given the dramatic
planning interventions which would be implemented,
it was decided that the aesthetic proposal should be
as bold and that the building externally should reflect
the radical planning changes being made. The exterior
needed to express this bold new agenda and allow the
building to form a proud and distinctive part of the Cape
Town skyline.
To achieve this, Redefine selected Boogertman+
Partners as architects to work with them on developing
the proposal. Contextual references were collated, site
informants gathered and cues sought in international
best practice. These were workshopped in a structured
process with the City to allow the responses to be
tested against the City’s urban plan and to optimise
The Towers contribution, both at the fine grain of the
pedestrian circulation and interfaces as well as at the
cityscape level.
Once the principles were bedded down and
agreed upon, an intensive series of conceptual design
developments, seeking ways of meeting these
requirements commenced; with feedback f