The John van de Werke Collection is housed at the Architecture Archives at the University of Pretoria (AAUP). Preserved in the collection are drawings, photo albums and documents related to the career of the architect John van de Werke (1913-1980). The collection was donated to the Department of Architecture in 1993 by Van de Werke’s wife. Photos and drawings from the collection were digitised between 2019 and 2021 as part of a research project funded by the Netherlands Embassy in Pretoria and some of these images also feature in the resultant book titled 'Common Ground - Dutch-South African Architectural Exchanges, 1902–1961’.

Summarised biography: John van de Werke arrived in Cape Town as a mid-level trained bouwkundige [construction engineer] from Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 1936. He was soon to travel further to Pretoria, where he initially worked as a building consultant and as a draughtsman in Gerard Moerdyk’s office, as he was officially not qualified to practice on his own account as an architect in South Africa.
Nonetheless, he designed some fine houses for private clients in Brooklyn and other Pretoria suburbs. The majority of these show his emulation of the regionalist Gooise landhuisstijl [country house style of Het Gooi]. This style was popular in the Netherlands during the 1920s and early 1930s and is marked by impressive overhanging roofs. He might have seen various villas in this style in and around Hilversum before he emigrated. Whereas the Dutch examples were mainly covered by thatch, Van de Werke’s South African villas were often covered in timber shingles and were articulated by expressive chimneys. Apparently this contemporary–romantic style, often also expressed in the design of the interior of his houses, appealed to many of his clients and he continued to apply it until the 1970s. Incidentally, these characteristic villa designs were interspersed with designs for flat-roofed houses in a modernist idiom, for which he may have sought inspiration from Dutch sources such as Gerrit Rietveld and Sybold van Ravesteyn, both in his former hometown of Utrecht. The X-based Huis Voortrekker (1940) hostel building, on the campus of the University of Pretoria, clearly echoes the health-oriented ‘light, air and sun’ architecture of Dutch Modern Movement architecture, as encapsulated in Jan Duiker’s Zonnestraal Sanatorium at Hilversum. Van de Werke’s work includes building types other than freestanding houses, such as tower locks and schools, but these categories need further exploration. (summarised biography by Marieke Kuipers)