Cape crusade
Resurrecting a disused grain silo, Heatherwick Studio creates a temple to contemporary African art and a hymn to concrete
Heatherwick Studio’s temple to contemporary African art
Looming over Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront – a mixed-use development bordering the Atlantic and interwoven with colonial structures and contemporary volumes in glass and steel – is a concrete silo. Built in 1921, it was where grain would be gathered, graded and eventually disseminated. This was the tallest building in sub-saharan Africa for half a century, and as such, a defining feature of the city’s skyline. Designed with a view that it would last forever, it nonetheless fell into disuse in 2001, eventually ravaged by floods, plunderers and bird droppings.
This September, however, the silo will receive a new lease of life as it reopens as the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA). Restored and transformed by Heatherwick Studio, with the backing of the Waterfront and German philanthropist Jochen Zeitz, this is the first museum on the continent dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, a long-awaited symbol of cultural prowess, and a towering architectural accomplishment.
The silo’s revival is a tale of determination and ingenuity. Designer Thomas Heatherwick first visited the site in 2005, when he had yet to receive the commission. There was no central space then to walk into, he recalls, just a warren of basement tunnels, above which there were two cellular structures with a total of 116 upright tubes – rectilinear ones in the lift tower (populated with vertical conveyor belts and fireman poles), and cylindrical ones in the bins annex.
It was another six years before the Waterfront decided to redevelop the silo. There was temptation to tear it down, but CEO David Green resisted. ‘The building has real soul and character,’ he explains, ‘I was drawn to the idea of repurposing the industrial architecture, and leaving that for future generations to enjoy.’ Heatherwick, now introduced to Green via Design Indaba founder Ravi Naidoo, had arrived at a similar conclusion: ‘A gigantic building made from tubes was a pretty strong starting point. We wanted to draw out something that only this building could give.’
They wanted it to house something of civic significance. Spurred on by the dearth of museums of scale in Cape Town, Green approached a number of international institutions with experience in foreign outposts, but ultimately settled on the art collection of Zeitz, a former chairman and CEO of Puma (see W*120). Working with South African curator Mark Coetzee, Zeitz was amassing 21st-century African art and scouring the continent for an appropriate brickand-mortar venue to show it – so it was natural that he and the Waterfront would pool their resources. He’d already come across Heatherwick’s UK pavilion for the 2010 Shanghai Expo, and was keen to work together.
The UK pavilion would come to inform the design of Zeitz MOCAA in another way. In commissioning that structure, the British government had allotted a significantly smaller budget than other Western nations, so Heatherwick decided to make a sixth of the site (the Seed Cathedral) memorable, while minimising expense elsewhere. At Zeitz MOCAA, he was working with a budget of R500m (about £30m), generous by local standards, but paltry in comparison to those of Renzo Piano’s Whitney ($422m) and Herzog & de Meuron’s Tate Modern extension (£260m). His design, therefore, focused on one standout interior element, an atrium, which would join the two structures of the silo into one, and serve as the museum’s primary draw.
The preexisting tubes were regular, says Heatherwick, ‘but cutting through them in a threedimensionally curving plane, something unexpected happens.’ He would carve out the atrium within these tubes in the same way one would take a hot wire to a block of butter. Eschewing regular geometric shapes, he took a grain of local corn, not unlike the grains that would have been stored in the silo in ages past, and scanned it digitally to obtain an organic, asymmetrical form. This form, cut into the concrete tubes, would produce a void with plenty of sharp angles. ‘It became a destruction project, not a construction project. Our job was more about careful removal than addition.’
Easier said than done. The silo is almost a century old, meaning the original concrete had set to its hardest form. The void was also difficult to visualise in situ, so builders had to rely on GPS and lasers to track progress, and the cylinders had leant against each other for stability, so a new support structure had to be installed while the void was hollowed out. Heatherwick was adamant there shouldn’t be beams and pillars (‘that would distract from the lightness we wanted’), so instead he added a new layer of concrete sleeving to reinforce the remaining parts of each cylinder.
The resulting atrium, which took between two and three million man-hours to complete, is the beating heart of the museum. Its sheer size and swooping curves give the impression of a cathedral, made all the more spectacular by the light that streams in through skylights that now cap the cylinders. The cross section of the original concrete is laid bare, its rougher surface contrasting with the smoothness of the new sleeves. One partially exposed cylinder now contains a spiral staircase; another two have been fitted with glass lifts, their mechanisms embedded into the new concrete sleeve to allow unobstructed views from the lift car. One has to ascend the building and see the atrium from varying heights to experience its full effect.»
‘It became a destruction project, not a construction project. Our job was more about careful removal than addition’