The Eskom Centre is a

office tower A skyscraper is a tall continuously habitable building having multiple floors. Modern sources currently define skyscrapers as being at least or in height, though there is no universally accepted definition. Skyscrapers are very tall high-ri ...

in the Central Business District of

Johannesburg Johannesburg ( , , ; Zulu and xh, eGoli ), colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, or "The City of Gold", is the largest city in South Africa, classified as a megacity, and is one of the 100 largest urban areas in the world. According to Dem ...

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...

. It was built in 1955 to a height of 61 metres. The building was the headquarters of

Eskom Eskom Hld SOC Ltd or Eskom is a South African electricity public utility. It was established in 1923 as the Electricity Supply Commission (ESCOM) and was also known by its Afrikaans name Elektrisiteitsvoorsieningskommissie (EVKOM). Eskom repre ...

from 1958 until the company relocated to

Sandton Sandton is an upscale commercial and residential district north of the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. It forms part of the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality. The name of the city came from the combination of two of its suburbs ...

in the mid-1980s. The building was the tallest building in Johannesburg when it was finished in 1958. The building was so high compared to other buildings in Johannesburg that it was the only one that could be seen from the patch of veld that is now called Kensington B.

Background

Eskom Centre replaced Eskom House, a building in the city centre built in 1937. The location is in Braamfontein on a block surrounded by Smit, Harrison, Loveday and Wolmarans Streets. Situated on the site of an old dairy and residential properties, the land was purchased for R522,441. The architects were R C Rinaldi & Partners and it was built for R3,709,241. The construction period was twenty-seven months with the building completed in October or November 1958. The building has 17 floors, was a height of 61.24 metres and had an underground area 13.6 metres below ground level. By the middle of the sixties, the company had again outgrown the building with staff spread out to other buildings. Eventually a decision was made to purchase land north of Sandton as a future headquarters site.

References

Office buildings completed in 1958 Commercial buildings completed in 1958 Skyscraper office buildings in Johannesburg 20th-century architecture in South Africa {{SouthAfrica-struct-stub