Buildings are often seen as background rather than agents, but the architecture of apartheid was both a weapon of and a witness to apartheid violence.

Over thirty years after the establishment of the groundbreaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission, many South Africans still do not know what happened to their loved ones killed by the state for their resistance. Apartheid era violence is still often absent from the formal record, although very present in people’s everyday lives. Many families, however, have not given up the search for truth and they demand that the official record be corrected. Architecture can help to uncover what really happened, bear witness to atrocity, and play a role in the search for truth and justice. South African firm Savage + Dodd Architects, at which one of us is a principal, for instance, has played an important role in this process for several prominent recent (re)inquests into apartheid-era deaths in detention at the notorious John Vorster Square Police Station.

Figure 1. John Vorster Square Police Station, 1968. Photograph by Heather Dodd, 2025.

Unfinished Business

Apartheid — South Africa’s legally enforced system of racial segregation — lasted from 1948 to 1994. Under its aegis, the Group Areas Act (1950) mandated the segregation of races in urban areas, with non-whites permitted to live only in designated areas. In white areas, buildings, services, and infrastructure, facilitated movement, productivity, and enjoyment. Everywhere else facilities were poor and services were absent. This logic of spatial separation trickled down into the buildings themselves, which included separate entrances and limited services for people in non-white racial categories. In these and many other ways apartheid was spatial, resulting in a legacy of spatial inequality that continues today.

In 1994, at the end of apartheid and the transition away from white minority rule to a fully enfranchised democracy, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established within a framework of restorative justice to uncover truths about gross human rights violations committed under apartheid. The TRC provided a platform for victims and survivors to publicly share their stories and, in many cases, to seek the truth from the perpetrators of these abuses. Amnesty was provided to those who disclosed the truth about their roles. By the closure of the TRC administrative operations in December 2001, more than three hundred cases had been recommended for further investigation and prosecution. This included the death of a high-profile doctor, Neil Aggett, in detention at John Vorster. These cases, which have not been investigated and prosecuted despite the TRC’s recommendation to do so — coupled with inadequate reparations and ongoing social and political marginalization — are often referred to as the “unfinished business” of the TRC.

Many in South Africa have pushed back against these gaps, demanding the promises of the TRC be realized. One way has been to reopen inquests in hope of overturning the verdicts of original inquests into the deaths of political activists in detention. The families of those who were tortured or murdered in detention see these new inquests as critical to both a sense of closure and to setting matters straight in the legal record. This type of correction is part of the ongoing work of re-forming and rebuilding South Africa. In addition to new archival evidence, new forensic evidence, including architectural, is being introduced. Critical in two recent cases (Ahmed Timol and Dr. Neil Aggett) has been the work of Savage + Dodd Architects in “decoding” the architecture of John Vorster. Advocates from the Foundation for Human Rights have used this evidence to amend the official records in both cases from “committed suicide in detention” to “tortured and died in detention at the hands of the security police.”

John Vorster Square

“The iconic institution of the apartheid years, of the years of torture, of the reign of the security police, of the reign of the mad forces.”

— Barbara Hogan, detained at John Vorster Square in 1981

Figure 3. Police photograph of John Vorster Square Room 1026, from original Inquest, 1972.

In August 1968, Prime Minister B.J. Vorster opened John Vorster Square Police Station in central Johannesburg. It was the largest in Africa and was heralded as “state-of-the-art.” The building itself was characterized by its blue spandrel panels and boxy shape with large amounts of glass on the entrance façade, giving it a feeling of transparency that, ironically, allowed it to obscure within the workings of everyday city life under apartheid. As prime minister Vorster was a hardliner who promoted a violent response to apartheid resistance, the police station took after its namesake and became a place of brutal suppression of those opposing the regime. Between 1970 and 1990, eight people died while detained there. These deaths — and the rather doubtful official versions of them — were part of the brutal reputation of the building and of apartheid. They form the material of Chris Van Wyk’s poem In Detention, where the official version of deaths in detention become increasingly muddled and nonsensical, the last five lines reading:

He slipped on the ninth floor while washing
He fell from a piece of soap while slipping
He hung from the ninth floor
He washed from the ninth floor while slipping
He hung from a piece of soap while washing.

Three inquests into these deaths have been reopened since 2017, two of which have been concluded. In both, the previous verdicts were reversed and security services implicated. The architecture of the building provided key evidence, as it looks set to do so for another recently re-opened inquest, into the death of Matthews Mabelane. The station, despite its camouflage into the tower blocks of a modern city, loomed large in the imagination of fear and psychological terror. The offices of the security branch located on the ninth and tenth floors, in particular, were notorious as a site of brutality and torture.

The Role of Architecture in Detention and Control

The role of buildings in upholding apartheid is critical to an understanding of these deaths. Police stations and prisons were infamous sites for suppressing anti-apartheid resistance through torture and death and were tangible warnings against resistance. These spaces were a fundamental part of apartheid’s suffocating and unceasing surveillance, which attempted to coerce non-whites (and, somewhat differently, white anti-apartheid activists) into surrender and obedience. Practices of detention and imprisonment were intimately intertwined with the government’s pursuit of control. The deaths of political activists held in detention without trial were attributed to suicide or simple misfortune. The buildings that housed these atrocities were designed for — and manipulated — to facilitate the degradation, torture, and killing. Narrative accounts by witnesses in the TRC hearings as well as the inquiries into deaths in detention mention architectural elements, including doors, windows, elevators, and staircases, as key to these abuses.

Figure 4. Illustration by Savage + Dodd Architects analyzing the cell in which Aggett was found hanging from Aggett Inquest Official Documents (2019). Photograph at left by Savage + Dodd Architects, 2018. Photograph at center by from original Inquest Documents, 1982.

At John Vorster Police Station, the building itself was modified to facilitate the work of the security branch through the creation of complex networks of routes to facilitate the movement of police and prisoners. Other elements, such as the staircases from which detained activists were suspended, offices in which they were tortured, and the roof from which they were thrown to their deaths, were not designed for torture and murder but were very effective in their repurposing. In these ways, the police used the building to control, disguise, regulate, and perpetrate gross forms of abuse. Here, the building became complicit in human rights violations.

“Architecture that the apartheid regime subverted and manipulated now bears witness to atrocity in the search for truth and justice.”

Ways and means: The Role of the Architect as Forensic Witness

Forensic architecture, the field, is heavily associated with the work of Forensic Architecture led by Eyal Weizman at Goldsmiths University in London, but offers a broad framework that can be applied elsewhere. While the “Forensic” in the name of Weizman’s research agency echoes a legal investigation, much of the work is, in fact, centered on raising awareness and presenting evidence to the public. Savage + Dodd’s efforts have focused more squarely on the legal realm. Understanding how buildings are made and how they work has allowed them to “decode” the station and present new plausible chains of events. Although their approach is more “analogue” than Forensic Architecture’s, it centers on uncovering of the witness testimony of the architecture and it provides a compelling spatial argument in a sequential, chronological manner to show what was possible (or not). This evidence has proved decisive.

Figure 5. Illustration by Savage + Dodd Architects mapping out the possible routes through John Vorster Square from Aggett Inquest Official Documents (2019). Photographs by Savage + Dodd Architects, 2018.

In the case of Ahmed Timol, the police claimed that he climbed out of a window. Savage + Dodd posed straightforward but vital questions: What was the construction of the window? What size? How high from the floor? How did it open? On to what surface? What was the drop to this surface? To open-up an essential line of inquiry about the account given in the original inquest, how possible was it that he could have climbed out of the window? To explore this, Savage + Dodd examined photographs, plans, and scale drawings. These materials are the everyday stuff of architectural practice. But in court, they revealed the role of the building as silent witness, and also as fatal weapon.

Figure 6. A passage in the male section of John Vorster Square showing a door linking the male and female sides of the second-floor cell block. The same door was not evident on the female side or on the building plans. Photograph by Savage + Dodd Architects, 2018.

Neil Aggett, was found hanged in his cell after being held for seventy days without trial. An inquest held in 1982 ruled his death a suicide. When it was reopened in January 2020 the central question was, did he hang himself or was he killed and subsequently strung up in his cell by security police? To answer it, there was an important spatial question that needed to be addressed. The torture and interrogation took place on the tenth floors of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) block. Aggett was found hanged in his cell on the second floor of the adjacent Cell Block. These are two quite disconnected spaces and there is a clear separation of routes into and out of these spaces, which would have made it hard for Aggett’s body to be moved.

Figure 7. Drawing by Savage + Dodd Architects showing the modified door and hidden passage within a cell at John Vorster Square, 2018.

How could a person or body be discreetly moved from the cell block to the Tenth Floor and back where no direct route existed? A former security policeman assisting the National Prosecution Authority, Paul Erasmus, testified that the security police could move with impunity throughout the building. It was up to Savage + Dodd to find out how: a plausible alternative narrative to prove that Aggett might have been taken out of his cell undocumented and moved to the tenth floor, where the police interrogated and possibly killed him before returning him to his cell — despite the fact that no such route appears on the building’s official plans.

Savage + Dodd pored over existing documentation of the building, stitching together various sets of drawings to reveal a complete plan. They annotated this clandestine plan with all points of access, vertical and horizontal. They also visited the building to explore further possible undocumented links between spaces. They found an unofficial physical modification: a hidden passage linking the male and female sides of the second-floor cell block. On the male side, a barred gate — not shown on plans — suggested a link between the two sides enabling a bypass of the control desk, where detainees were signed in and out. From the female side, one could descend to the basement, cross over into the CID, and take dedicated lifts up to the security branch floors. This route introduced the possibility that Aggett could have been taken to and from his cell without being logged.

Figure 8. Architects Heather Dodd and Colin Savage cross referencing plans with the actual at John Vorster Square and discovering an alteration. Photograph by Savage + Dodd Architects, 2018.

Since the conclusion of the first reopened inquests, other families of individuals killed in detention have sought similar legal recourse. They are now calling on the government to come good on the promises made to restorative justice in the 1990s and to investigate cases that were referred for further investigation and possible prosecution by the TRC. Many of these cases have spatial components. Architecture, and those experts like Savage + Dodd who can read it, are playing a pivotal role. In these cases, the same architecture that the apartheid regime subverted and manipulated now bears witness to atrocity in the search for truth and justice.

Citation

Laura Routley, Yusuf Patel, and Heather Dodd, “Architecture as Witness Against Apartheid Violence,” PLATFORM, November 24, 2025.

Nov 24 Architecture as Witness Against Apartheid Violence

Nov 17 In What Style Must We Build?

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