Coordinates: 26°11'26.79" S 28°02'41.79" E Alt: 1787m
Transcription of Blue Plaque:
JOHANNESBURG CITY HERITAGE
ESSELEN STREET
CLINIC
Formerly Colin Gordon Nursing Home
This is the work of a highly inventive architect who
rejected the rational approach, choosing to express
emotion in his buildings. In 1941 Wilhelm B Pabst
designed a bastion against dread disease using imagery
from a castle. There are surgical cuts to be endured, a
battery of injections, life hangs by a thread. Curves,
squares, rectangles are all involved. There is nothing
simple about disease, but medicine triumphs and
over-sails the site boundaries with the array of
balconies and the great Oriel window.
