Description

Built by architects Hallen, Dibb & Partners (architect of record: Hans Hallen), the Scully Dining Hall (1966) was designed together with the John Bews Hall of Residence (1964) and the Mabel Palmer Hall of Residence (1965) in a unified, stylistic idiom of “romantic” Brutalism (Greig, 1971, p. 113). They display strong geometric forms, a palette of austere, off-shutter concrete and facebrick, and timber screens and railings, with lightweight aluminium adjustable-louvre glazing. Perhaps surprising, the apartheid state in South Africa embraced the Modern Movement, and Brutalism in particular, with its raw, muscular display of concrete and the textural earthiness of clay-tiling and facebrick. Using this idiom, Hans Hallen achieved a landscaped ensemble with structurally bold and highly adventuresome interiors for the delight of the students.

Programmatically, the halls reflected an English “Oxbridge” influence, where privileged white students could study and live sociably, and eat together, wearing formal academic gowns. Sixty years on, the student population is racially diverse, the dining hall has become a gymnasium and the raw concrete surfaces are brightly painted.

In concept, each hall is centred around its own atrium. Geometrically, however, the spatial planning and cross-sections of each building could not be more diverse. Stylistically ⎯ in their monumentality and interior manipulation of light ⎯ the inspiration by Louis Kahn is evident. But the style here is more playful and less solemn, with circulation bridges, skylights and multi-tiered levels activating movement and views throughout. Functionally, the multi-storeyed atrium, as a typological form, aids cross-ventilation, reduces humidity and modifies heat gain.

The halls were intended to be appreciated three-dimensionally, as a set of “monumental sculptures” in a densely vegetated coastal sub-tropical landscape. Hillside terrain and coastal bushland dominate the campus setting. The daily circulation, when students return on foot from the hilltop lectures and libraries to the halls of residence, is downhill, with a sequence of partial views of façades and roofscapes, cloaked in vegetation. Walking along a network of ramped footpaths, seated forecourts and terraced stairways, the impact of gravity is lessened by manipulation of steep contours around and views between structures, and by directional shifts in movement routes up and down the slope. Hallen’s campus grouping has been likened to “spotting rhinoceroses … glimpsed amongst the foliage”. (Fisher and Clarke, 2014, p. 64).

Scully Dining Hall is centrally located between the two halls of residence. Entry to the dining hall is down a single, steeply sloping, sculptural stairway, terminating in a concrete-seated and landscaped forecourt. Underneath the forecourt slab is the kitchen and canteen with a series of giant, concrete light scoops—excavated into the hillside. The stairway splits either side of the dining hall and its subterranean kitchen, flanking downwards to John Bews Hall of Residence via a stepped ramp to the east and to Mabel Palmer Hall to the west.
The axis of entry leads onto the suspended first-floor gallery with central atrium. Both gallery and principal dining floor below are top-lit naturally from a single, central skylight. Unlike the central staircases of the two residences, circulation between floors is via a pair of angular stairwells located in the cross-axis, attached beyond the footprint of the hall. A clear floor space for dining, with no internal supports, is achieved for both levels by suspending the entire first floor with concrete-encased steel rods from the concrete roof beams above.
The axis—down the stairway, across the entrance forecourt, into the first-floor gallery and across the central atrium—is visually extended outwards through the south elevation. Here, full-height projecting bays of glazed and louvred windows add a sculptural quality to the façade that is protected all year from direct sun. East and west elevations, which absorb the full force of the sun, have facebrick infill panels to the fair-faced concrete framing. The panels are articulated with sparse, irregularly spaced, vertical strips of glass.
Of the three buildings, Scully Hall has been altered the most. The obsolete dining hall was initially turned into a music school, then into a staff club and now into a student gymnasium. However, the thick aluminium fenestration and the painting over fair-faced concrete compromised the building’s Brutalist origins.

References

Fisher, R. and Clarke, N. (2014). Architectural Guide: South Africa. Berlin: DOM Publishers.

Greig, D. (1971). A guide to Architecture in South Africa. Cape Town: Howard Timmins.

Mungroo, M. (2016). Renowned Architect Hans Hallen visits UKZN Residences. In: UKZNABA online vol.4(24), 26 May 2016.

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Originally published in: Uta Pottgiesser, Ana Tostões, Modernism in Africa. The Architecture of Angola, Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Birkhäuser, 2024.