Thomas Heatherwick will turn a concrete colossus in Cape Town into a cathedral for contemporary African art.

Turning defunct industrial complexes into temples of culture is a common occurrence in the post-industrial West, but Thomas Heatherwick’s proposal to convert a grain silo into a museum of contemporary art in Cape Town does more than put an old structure to new use.

London-based Heatherwick can turn his hand to plenty of things. Works of his that have made it from idea to reality include leather handbags, double-decker busses, and a bridge that rolls up like a measuring tape.

Now he has designed a museum inside a huge grain silo on the waterfront in Cape Town. Some 9,500 m2 in area and 57 m tall, the silo consists for the most part of a cellular structure of vertical concrete cylinders. As the complex doesn’t feature any core around which to organize the museum, Heatherwick simply created one by carving galleries and circulation space out of the concrete.

Scheduled to open its doors by the end of 2016, the museum will be called the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (Zeitz MOCAA for short). It is the brainchild of Jochen Zietz, a wunderkind who in 1993, at the age of 30 became the youngest ever head of a public company in Germany when appointed CEO of Puma.

Over the past decade, his Zeitz Collection has been zealously accumulating African art. At the 2013 Venice Biennale alone, it snapped up no fewer than 85 works. That collection will now be made accessible to a local, national and international audience. Zeitz is not only offering his artworks in perpetuity but also underwriting the operational costs of the museum and providing funds for new acquisitions.

Heatherwick has until the end of 2016 to complete the project.

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