The Carlton Centre is a towering skyscraper and shopping centre situated in Johannesburg, South Africa. It stands as a significant landmark, boasting a rich history and unique architectural features.
Carlton Centre Johannesburg
Key Facts and Figures
- The Carlton Centre has 50 floors.
- At 223 metres (732 ft), it is the second tallest building in Africa. Only The Leonardo is taller.
- Roughly 46 % of its 75 000 m² floor area lies below street level - one of the highest sub-grade ratios in any global super-tall.
History and Ownership
Anglo American and SAB (South African Breweries) were the original owners of the land. Anglo American then bought out SAB’s shares and became the sole owner.
The Carlton Complex cost R88 million to build. Anglo American sold the entire Carlton Complex to Transnet in 1999 for R33 million.
The Carlton Centre is the main office for Transnet. Transnet is a big transport company owned by the government in South Africa.
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In June 2007, then Transnet group chief executive Maria Ramos revealed the company's intention to offer the building for sale, as part of their plan to sell things they did not need. But because of money problems around the world, they decided to wait.
The building used to be almost empty. But now, 93 percent of its office space is used and about 65 percent of the shops are also busy. Big companies like Pick 'n Pay and the South African Revenue Service have moved in.
Design and Construction
The Carlton Centre was designed by a US company called Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in conjunction with a local firm W. First, the old Carlton Hotel was taken down. Digging for the Carlton Centre began in January 1967. This part took two years to finish.
People started moving into the Centre in 1971. However, the whole building was not fully finished until 1974. The Carlton Centre officially opened in 1973.
Designers took cues from One Seneca Tower in Buffalo and other SOM projects, exporting a minimalist American aesthetic to apartheid-era Johannesburg. Granite-clad plaza walls reference the hard Witwatersrand rock that generated the city’s gold wealth, rooting the modernist form in local geology.
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The tower is a slim rectangular prism that rises unbroken from a two-storey plaza, echoing mid-century American corporate towers. Two outrigger floors at levels 18 and 38 stitch core to columns and limit apex drift to one-five-hundredth of height under regional winds.
Slip-form rigs climbed at 100 mm per hour, a continental speed record in the early 1970s. Black-tinted curtain-wall units, imported from the United States, were unitised on site and trailed structure by only three floors, cutting programme time.
The podium’s twin underground shopping levels introduced South Africa’s first fully air-conditioned retail mall, complete with pressurised smoke-exhaust shafts. Although conceived before today’s green codes, the bronze-tinted glazing reduced solar gain compared with clear glass and limited daytime cooling loads.
In June 2018 Transnet announced a planned mechanical retrofit including LED lighting and high-efficiency chillers as part of a wider asset-optimisation drive. A naturally ventilated service void behind the façade creates a modest stack-effect exhaust that lowers internal temperatures on mild spring and autumn days.
The 5 m-diameter caissons of the foundation double as Johannesburg’s deepest groundwater-monitoring wells. An underground conveyor once whisked hotel laundry beneath Commissioner Street to a service annex, a trick copied years later by other African high-rise hotels.
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Carlton Centre Under Construction
The Carlton Hotel
When it opened, the 5-star Carlton Hotel was a big part of the complex. It had 30 floors. However, the area around the hotel changed in the 1990s.
The hotel closed down in 1998. Anglo American had plans to sell 70% of the hotel to a Malaysian company that wanted to convert it into a casino. However, they could not get a casino licence so the sale fell through. The office tower and retail are operational, however the hotel is still closed.
The adjacent Carlton Hotel hosted Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, Whitney Houston and Mick Jagger during the 1970s and 1980s. Nelson Mandela held a private strategy meeting in one of the hotel suites on May 10, 1994, the night before his presidential inauguration. Fashion mogul Gianni Versace staged Africa’s first couture trunk show in the hotel ballroom on August 15, 1993.
Koffiehuis Café
The Koffiehuis Café was at its most popular in the 1970’s and was to be found just off the foyer of the Carlton Hotel and it was a favourite. When the Carlton Hotel opened in 1972, it replaced an earlier, perfectly pleasant and original Carlton hotel that once stood on the site.
The new Carlton , thirty storeys tall, with six hundred luxury rooms ,was billed as the swankiest skyscraper anywhere from Cape to Cairo. It stood beside a sister behemoth, the Carlton Centre, fifty storeys tall, spread across six square blocks of prime real estate, comprising office tower, department store, giant exhibition centre and a rooftop skating rink.
The men behind the idea came from premier mining house in Joburg , Anglo American . They felt that Joburg was on the road to becoming a world class city and needed an equivalent of the Rockefeller Centre.
The Koffiehuis menu offered Belgian waffles filled raisins and a brandy butter sauce, French onion soup, Welsh Rarebit, eggs Benedict and bottomless cups of coffee .A pianist at the gleaming grand in a corner was a special feature of the Koffiehuis Café and his chosen melodies, Viennese waltzes.
The menu was also available in braille, another ‘ first of its kind.’ The table-wear was copied from designs of the original crockery, carried on three ships of the Dutch East India Company that brought Jan van Riebeeck and the first white settlers to the Cape in 1652.
Strangest of all, in the Carlton Hotel and the Koffiehuis Café, black , brown and Asian people, were to be seen at the tables, as if this was all perfectly normal. The Carlton was an ‘international ‘ hotel . It had been freed by the government from the stifling racial restrictions that applied everywhere else.
The Koffiehuis was ‘multiracial ‘, a word so loaded with contentious interpretations that merely using it in apartheid South Africa could get you into trouble.
The "Top of Africa"
The very top floor of the Carlton Centre is the 50th floor. It is called the Carlton Panorama and is known colloquially as the "Top of Africa".
View from the "Top of Africa"
Historical Significance and Records
The Carlton Centre was once the tallest building in the southern part of the world. From September 1, 1973 to April 18, 2019 the Carlton Centre reigned as Africa’s tallest skyscraper, a 46-year streak unmatched on the continent. It was also the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere until January 1, 1977, when Sydney’s MLC Centre surpassed it.
The claim of the Leonardo’s record-breaking height seems a case of overeagerness. But it would have to triple its effort to take the global crown, held by Dubai’s 828-metre Burj Khalifa.
Carlton Centre in Popular Culture
Exterior shots of the tower stand in for Multinational United’s HQ in “District 9” (released August 14, 2009). South African soap opera “Isidingo” used the plaza as a stock exchange backdrop in several episodes aired in 2010.
Quick Facts Table
| Parameter | Data | Specification |
|---|---|---|
| Location | Commissioner & Main Streets, Johannesburg CBD, South Africa | Mixed-use skyscraper (office - retail - former hotel) |
| Height | 223 m | 732 ft |
| Floors | 50 | Above Ground |
| Year Completed | September 1, 1973 | |
| Architect | Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with W |
Top 10 Tallest Buildings In Africa (under construction)
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