The former Pass Office at 80 Albert Street in Johannesburg is sufficiently nondescript and untethered to any evolving national narrative to have remained abandoned decades after apartheid. Seen as neither redemptive nor exemplary, the building sits neglected and forgotten, a social and historical cipher yet to be unravelled. Such an incongruous apartheid facility was significant, reaching pervasively into the lives of every single black male living in Johannesburg but containing as it does a history few seek to remember or commemorate. Yet in its absence from our architectural heritage there is an incomplete record of the thoroughly damaging racist urban path once wrought within its corridors: the hated pass book that this office was responsible for issuing, controlling African migration to the city and making urban life temporary through influx control, maintaining segregation through the planning of all surrounding townships, administering at times all official aspects of black life.

There is little to distinguish this banal office block from other more notorious apartheid edifices, except for the seemingly innocuous set of entrance doors to the main administration hall: invisible to the white public beyond the building itself, the doors can only be accessed by the black public from the back courtyard of the building (figure 7.1). Has the abandonment of this building obfuscated the ominous work of segregation and deprivation of a generation ago? In striving against forgetting through architecture, should this building remain vacant rather than being preserved for posterity or reduced to a brick carcass with a sombre history? At times, it has served as a shelter for women, a creche and a city clinic. With no certainty and minimal preservation, tenants are vulnerable, the paint and panels peeling away, walls crumbling, and windows and railings coming loose. The question lingers as to what relevance the building might hold for a new generation of South Africans, faced as they are with a growing dissociation of historical events with sites such as this once embodied. Why is it ignored, absent from our collective memory, in its current condition remaining as neither ruin, rubble nor memorial? What does 80 Albert Street reveal to us today?

It was here that the remorseless system of apartheid was brought together for the city of Johannesburg, with operations relating to influx control, housing and employment of African men centralised in the building.