✖ THE BASICS The Transvaal Provincial Administration (TPA) building, now Public Works House, is one of Tshwane’s most significant yet publicly unappreciated works of architecture. Inaugurated in 1963, the project was a highlight of state-sponsored Modernism – a prestigious and politically motivated development of immense scale and technological complexity, intended to portray the apartheid state as a progressive government. It also introduced an era of high-rise construction to the city. Mostly vacant since the mid-1990s, the TPA building towers over the southwestern part of Church Square, hiding within it a variety of architectural surprises – and a remarkable collection of artworks by some of the greatest white South African artists of the time.
