Zeitz MOCAA Cape Town by Studio Heatherwick

London-based Thomas Heatherwick has carved the inside of a disused grain silo building on Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront, transforming it into South Africa’s biggest art museum. Built in 1921, the silo was the tallest building in the country for over half a century, acting as a defining feature of the city’s skyline. Although designed to last forever, the building fell into disuse in 2001.

This month, the silo reopens as Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), set to become the world’s most important exhibition space for African art.

Heatherwick and his team have carved huge sections out of the building’s tubular interior, creating a complex network of 80 gallery spaces. Without wanting to completely obliterate the ‘tubularity’ of the original structure, the design team approached the transformation much like archaeology, virtually excavating the new gallery spaces out of the existing architecture.

The museum centres around a vast atrium, which took between two and three million man-hours to complete. Its form is based on the shape of a single grain of corn, scaled up to span the full height of the 27-metre-high structure.

The atrium’s sheer size and swooping curves give the impression of a cathedral, with spectacular light streams arriving into the belly of the interior through newly installed skylights on top of the existing cylinders.

In the places where concrete tubes of the silo were cut back, the edges were polished to highlight a visible contrast between the rough aggregate of the old concrete. This atrium now provides access to all of the exhibition spaces, measuring 6,000 square metres in total.

Originally coated in magnolia paint, the silo’s exterior has been water-jetted to reveal the concrete that celebrates its original texture. The building’s newly installed faceted windows draw light down into the atrium, offering a mesmerising visual effect reminiscent of kaleidoscopes.