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Louis Michel Thibault – THE FATHER OF SOUTH AFRICAN ARCHITECTURE
September 12 @ 5:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Please join us in The Garden Room, The Plettenberg, Church Street, Plettenberg Bay, on Friday 12thSeptember 2025.
Rodney Grosskopff, well- known Plett raconteur, renowned architect and amateur historian, returns to the podium to tell us about Louis Michel Thibault, one of South Africa’s greatest architects.
Born 1750 in Picquigny, France, a small town on the River Somme, near Amien, little is known of his early life but he must have been affected by the architecture around him.
He enrolled at the Royal Academy of Architecture in Paris and proved to be a brilliant student, winning prizes and being selected to present his design for the coat of arms of the Academy to King Louis XV.
He then went on to study military engineering and joined a Swiss mercenary regiment.
The Dutch East India Company (VOC) employed the mercenaries to guard the Cape against possible invasion by the British.
Thibault arrived in the Cape in 1783.
After peace was declared he remained in the Cape and he set up a private architectural practice.
Louis Michel Thibault was the first formally trained architect to practice in South Africa and was certainly the premier architect of his time.
Tempered by local taste and his use of local labour and building materials, he did more than anyone to establish an architectural style which could be called “ South African”.
His collaboration with Anton Anreith, a young sculptor and woodcarver from Freiburg, and Hermann Schutte a young architect and builder from Bremen, produced several prestigious projects including the Lodge de Goeie Hoop which is today part of the parliamentary complex.
The Drostdy in Graaff-Reinet is also a beautifully preserved example of Thibault’s work built in 1804. The building is still in use as a five-star hotel.
Unfortunately many of his works were demolished.
Thibault died on 3/11/1815 from bronchopneumonia caused by exposure while surveying properties along the road from Cape Town to Simon’s Town.
He was buried in a self-designed plain Masonic tomb in the Somerset Street Cemetery which was later demolished to make way for lower Buitengracht.
His mortal remains and plaque could not be found.