New Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg rises

Michael Coulson

For some months now, those who travel along Jo’burg’s Jan Smuts Avenue have noticed a strange elliptical concrete structure slowly rising on the corner of Jellicoe, just down the road from the Everard Read Gallery. The corner site was actually bought by the gallery 20-odd years ago, when the then owner, the old Johannesburg City Council, decided it was surplus to requirements, but for most of the time since then it stood idle, used mainly for surplus parking during gallery openings.

How to develop it has thus had a long gestation. For years the gallery’s present director, Mark Read, felt that the gallery’s handsome and much-loved premises rather petered out on the western boundary, and at one time considered building a small space – “nothing ambitious” for contemporary art there.

But gradually the concept expanded, and a desire grew to put up a multi-purpose building that would be an adornment to the city. Also,

partly through the passage
of time and partly given greater freedom after buying out other members of the family from the business, his own horizons expanded. The final building block fell into place when he met architect Pierre Swanepoel, and discovered in enthusiastic discussions that they shared a vision of what could be done.

When I first spoke to Read about the building, last year, unofficial cost estimates were put at R10m-R12m, and he planned an environmentally positive project. Today he ruefully admits that those were vain hoped. “The cost has gone way north of that, as for an elliptical building almost every component has to be purpose-made, and you can hardly have a less environmentally sound building than one made of concrete with an aluminium cladding.”
Nevertheless, the building will reflect Read’s growing interests in things other than selling art, especially palaeontology. The building will basically have three levels (“Unless some day I build a pent
house on the top”). The ground
floor he describes as a project and office space, with a ramp curling up to the middle level, a towering exhibition space big enough to suspend motor cars from the ceiling, and then another ramp up to the top to accommodate Darwin’s, an oyster bar which will be a private club for his friends.

He doesn’t see the exhibition space as primarily for selling art, though that won’t be precluded. Rather, he envisages seasons displaying new technologies. Like building with bamboo, as is being done at a resort he’s involved with in the Seychelles.

He’s also increasingly involved with people like Richard Leakey and Richard (The God Delusion) Dawkins and wants to show Leakey’s “amazing” East African fossils. He’d like to take works out of museums and show them in a different space, juxtaposed with other objects, and is confident museums will go along with this. For example, the old Transvaal Museum has a chunk of moon
rock: he’d like to show this next to