Ponte City Apartments

Ponte City is a cylindrical residential skyscraper in the Berea district of Johannesburg, South Africa, completed in 1975 to a height of 173 meters across 55 stories. Its designers Mannie Feldman, Manfred Hermer, and Rodney Grosskopff drew inspiration from Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City in Chicago to create Africa's first cylindrical skyscraper, whose hollow central atrium admits natural light into wedge shaped apartments around its circumference. The tower held the title of Africa's tallest residential building for 48 years, until 2023, and its history traces an arc from modernist ambition through a period of urban decay and crime in the late 1980s and 1990s to later revitalization, making it a recurring subject in photography, film, and literature about post apartheid Johannesburg.