Park Station (Third) - Rotunda - Johannesburg

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Built: 1961-1963 (planned in 1959-1960)

Architect: Kennedy, Furner, Irvine-Smith & Joubert

Location: Leyds St, Johannesburg

Status: Extant

Rotunda and Admin Building, c.1976. (Source: Frans Erasmus II on FB)


The building was SAA’s Johannesburg city terminal for check-in, reservations, waiting, and transfers to Jan Smuts Airport (now OR Tambo). It was an integrated transport hub - passengers could move seamlessly between rail concourses, the Rotunda, buses, taxis, and parking. The circular layout made one-way passenger flow very efficient.

It accommodated all the passenger facilities required in a city terminal - enquiry office, reservations, tourist office, luggage areas, waiting rooms, tea room, shops, bookstall - built next to the taller office block on the new deck slab between Rissik and Harrison Streets / Leyds Street, west of the Rissik Bridge.

It formed a striking architectural trio with the main station concourses and the adjacent tall SAA Administration Headquarters block immediately to the south.

Design:

  • Perfectly circular (51 m / ≈167 ft diameter) on an east-west axis so buses could turn smoothly inside.
  • Full-height curved glass walls with slender vertical steel mullions.
  • Shallow saucer dome roof covered in 18 tons of standing-seam copper (tapered panels with prominent seams) over timber, with a broad cantilevered overhang and a small annular copper finial at the apex.
  • Double-volume interior with the domed ceiling visible; narrow perimeter bands for offices/support on ground and first floors.
  • West-side cantilevered entrance canopy; plane trees planted around it to reinforce the circular theme.

The building was completed and opened in 1962/1963 (SAA staff had moved into the adjacent admin building by 30 April 1962; the Rotunda passenger hall followed immediately after).

Later

Photo c.2015. (Construction Review)

It operated for decades but fell into disuse as SAA centralised at the airport and the building passed to PRASA (Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa). By the early 2020s it was derelict and heavily vandalised: the entire copper roof was stripped, walls punched through, and the interior gutted. Heritage groups (Johannesburg Heritage Foundation, etc.) sounded alarms from 2020 onward, calling it a major loss, but little was done. As of the most recent reports it is still standing but in ruins - “nothing left to save” according to some observers, though its architectural and historical significance as a 1960s Modernist landmark (part of the bigger station ensemble) is undisputed.

Photo July 2025. (Carl Heydenrych on FB)

Locality map

Sources

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