Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa

Inside a 1920s grain silo on Cape Town's harbour front, a cluster of 42 tightly packed concrete tubes has been sliced open to form a soaring atrium, its curved walls cut cleanly through so that the circular sections of the old cylinders show like the cross-section of a honeycomb. Daylight falls from above through the capped tops of the shafts. Zeitz MOCAA, which opened on 22 September 2017, was launched as the largest museum of contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, and the building is as much a part of the experience as the collection.

The silo, 57 metres tall, was built between 1921 and 1924 and once stored and graded maize from across South Africa. When the port moved on, the V&A Waterfront partnered with the German businessman and collector Jochen Zeitz to turn it into a public, non-profit museum, with Zeitz lending his collection for his lifetime. London's Heatherwick Studio, led by Thomas Heatherwick, began the conversion in 2014. Rather than demolish the dense cellular structure, the designers carved a large central space out of it and cut the perimeter tubes back into five floors of galleries. The glass that now caps the carved shafts is fritted with a pattern commissioned from the West African artist El Loko, and in the old grading tower above, the walls between the frame were replaced with bulging, faceted glass panes that catch the changing colours of the day. In all the museum covers about 9,500 square metres over nine floors, with a sculpture garden on the lower roof; the upper levels of the tower became a hotel. The building was named to the RIBA International List in 2018.

The inaugural display drew on the permanent collection with work by some forty artists, among them El Anatsui, William Kentridge, Zanele Muholi, Wangechi Mutu, Chris Ofili and Kehinde Wiley, and later exhibitions have ranged from surveys of Otobong Nkanga and Senzeni Marasela to a broad overview of contemporary Zimbabwean painting. The museum also runs an education centre and an artist residency. It stands in the Silo District of the V&A Waterfront, the redeveloped Victorian harbour at the foot of Table Mountain; Cape Town, founded as a Dutch supply station in the seventeenth century, is South Africa's oldest city and its legislative capital.

Getting there

The museum is in the Silo District of the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, about 2 km from central Cape Town. Cape Town International Airport (CPT) is about 18 km away in a straight line.