Ponte City Apartments
Cylindrical fifty five story tower with a hollow core open to the sky, once filled with five stories of trash.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Ponte City Apartments in Johannesburg opens with 1990s city officials seriously discussing turning Africa's tallest apartment tower into a prison, and traces how the fifty-five-story cylinder, built in 1975 as whites-only luxury housing, got its most famous feature: a hollow core running straight through its center. You'll hear why local building codes forced that design, and how the tower changed after apartheid ended and its garbage began piling up in that same shaft. A listening tip: look straight up through the open core from the courtyard below.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Top of Africa
Fiftieth-floor observation deck atop a nineteen seventies skyscraper, offering sweeping panoramic city views.
Apartheid Museum
Museum recreating apartheid-era segregation through a randomly assigned entrance, before tracing the system's rise and fall.
Soweto
Sprawling township of vibrant streets and murals, birthplace of the uprising that shook apartheid.
Maboneng Precinct
Post-industrial arts and culture district of converted warehouses, murals, markets and creative studios in a former no-go inner-city zone.
Newtown
Former fruit market turned theatre and arts district where apartheid-era audiences defied segregation laws.
Rosebank
Leafy commercial district of galleries, malls and a rooftop craft market once segregated under apartheid law.