A Cathedral Cut from Grain: How Cape Town’s Silo Became Zeitz MOCAA
Feature
Cape Town’s grain elevator – 42 concrete silos and a grading tower – was carved into a contemporary art museum in 2017. How Heatherwick Studio cut a cathedral-scale atrium out of cellular concrete, what now hangs inside it, and why the subtraction is the point.
Viacheslav Munister · 2026-10-21
For most of the twentieth century, the tallest thing on Cape Town’s working harbour was not a hotel or an office block but a grain elevator. It stood at the edge of what is now the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, a slab of grey concrete with a tower on one side, and its only job was to receive maize from all over South Africa, store it and grade it before it went onto ships. Nobody was meant to walk inside it. Nobody was meant to look at it.
In 2017 that same building opened as Zeitz MOCAA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Africa – in the words of the architects who rebuilt it, Africa’s first international museum dedicated to contemporary African art. Today it is one of the most unusual museum interiors in the world: a cathedral-scale atrium cut out of a bundle of concrete tubes, lit from above through glass, with five floors of galleries wrapped around it. This is a story about a method – carving instead of building – and about what happens when a museum is forced to answer to its own architecture.
I · A machine for grain
A grain silo is the opposite of a museum. A museum is a sequence of rooms made for people; a silo is a machine made for a commodity. Heatherwick Studio, the London practice that was approached by the V&A Waterfront to develop and adapt the site, describes the original structure as two elements: a grading tower, and a block of 42 tightly packed concrete silos – tall cylinders standing shoulder to shoulder in a grid, each one a closed tube with no windows and no floors. The Zeitz MOCAA website dates the building to the 1920s.
The geometry is the whole story, so it is worth looking at. In plan, the silo block is a field of circles: six columns by seven rows of cylinders, with the leftover space between them forming small star-shaped voids. Each circle is a structural wall as much as a container. Remove one and you change how the whole block carries its load. That is what made the building so hard to convert, and so interesting once it was.
By the time the studio arrived, containerised shipping had made the building redundant. It had been decommissioned and was waiting for a purpose, which is the usual situation for industrial giants: demolish, or find a use that deserves the structure. Heatherwick’s account is that the V&A Waterfront had asked the studio to develop and adapt the site, and that shortly afterwards a separate initiative began to create a museum for contemporary African art.
II · Two programmes, one building
The two projects coincided. The silo would become the permanent home for the collection of Jochen Zeitz, the former Puma chief executive, and the Zeitz Foundation, and the catalytic starter for the new museum. The museum’s own account of its collection is a useful counterweight to the myth of a single patron: the permanent collection was established in 2015, and consists of more than 500 objects – works on paper and canvas, photographs, sculptures, video works, installations – by artists from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Madagascar, the United States, Kenya, Sudan and elsewhere.
A large part of it is a recent donation of artworks formerly on long-term loan from Zeitz, now joined by gifts from artists, collectors and enthusiasts. The institution describes the collection as thoroughly contemporary, and the themes it names are the ones the building has to hold: migration, human rights, visibility, memory and desire. It also holds comprehensive bodies of work by single artists, among them Nandipha Mntambo, Zanele Muholi and Kudzanai Chiurai.
III · Carving, not building
The brief contained a trap. Forty-two tubes are efficient for storing grain, but they are almost useless for hanging paintings. They are curved, narrow and dark, and a gallery needs flat walls, floor space and light. The obvious solution would have been to gut the structure and start again, which would have kept the footprint and lost everything that made the building worth keeping.
The studio’s answer was to treat the silo block as a solid and to carve it. Rather than resorting to wholesale demolition, they set out to convert the multitude of concrete tubes into spaces for art while retaining the industrial character of the silo. A large central space was carved out of the cellular concrete to form the museum’s major social space – a void that reveals the original intersecting geometries in an unexpected way. The perimeter tubes were then substantially cut back and converted into five floors of galleries for permanent and temporary exhibitions. The museum adds that the atrium’s carved form was inspired by a single grain of corn.
What this meant on site was surgery. Before a saw touched the structure, the cut lines were marked on the concrete surface; then the walls were cut out section by section, rather than knocked down. The photographs from the works show how physical the process was: a ring of workers on a platform inside a single tube, cutting discs the size of dinner tables, and scaffolding filling an opened shaft.
The result is the opposite of the usual conversion. Nothing was added to make the concrete look old, and nothing was plastered over to make it look new. What remained after cutting was kept as found: the finished edges of the tubes, the ribbed marks of the 1920s formwork, the colour of the material. The new building is made of the same stuff as the old one, and you can tell exactly where one stops and the other begins.
A silo is built to hide what it holds. The museum’s first act was to cut it open.
IV · The atrium
The result is the thing visitors photograph first. Walk in from the waterfront and you stand at the foot of a space whose walls are the cut-away cylinders: huge ovals and arches of raw concrete rising several floors, with glass lifts and walkways threading between them. It does not look like any gallery lobby. It looks closer to a quarry, or to the inside of a cathedral designed by someone who had only ever seen grain stores.
Daylight is the second half of the idea. The finished carved tubes above the atrium allow daylight in from above through thick layers of laminated glass, fritted with a pattern commissioned from the West African artist El Loko. The frit does two jobs at once: it forms a walkable surface for the sculpture garden on the upper level, and it lets daylight in while protecting from too much heat building up inside. The museum describes the light as flooding through tubes five and a half metres wide, connecting industrial heritage with modern design.
What the architecture refuses to do is as important as what it does. It does not smooth the concrete. It does not hide the cuts. A contemporary art museum is usually a neutral container, a white box that disappears behind the work; this one has a character so strong that art has to answer it. For some curators that is a difficulty. For the audience it is the reason to come.
V · The tower
The grading tower tells a different story from the silos. Here the studio left the structural frame in place and cut the concrete walls away between the columns, creating new three-dimensionally shaped windows that reflect a kaleidoscope of textures and colours, changing through the day. At night, the glow of lights inside transforms the tower into a beacon in the harbour.
VI · What hangs in the void
A building this strong is a test for the art. The museum’s answer is to give the atrium its own commissions. From 25 October 2025 to 25 October 2026 the atrium holds The Procession, a site-specific work by the Ghanaian-American artist Rita Mawuena Benissan: a large-scale cylindrical tapestry of sheer fabric and embroidered canvas, hung at the centre of the atrium bowl. Benissan’s practice is rooted in the traditions of Ghanaian royalty, where public processions honour chiefs under canopies of dancing royal umbrellas, and the work carries that vocabulary – colour, community, drumming, motifs of seagulls and palm fronds – through the full height of the space.
The museum describes the work as a delicate apparition that softens its rough concrete surroundings – ethereal and monumental, responding to the quiet stir of a breeze, the shifting light and the chatter of visitors. It is a good description of what the silo does to everything inside it: the concrete makes anything soft look softer, and anything loud look louder.
Elsewhere in the building, the programme is as ambitious as the shell. On Level 2 the permanent collection is shown in the long-running Selections from the Collection, with works by Zanele Muholi, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, Nandipha Mntambo, Ebony G. Patterson, Thebe Magugu and others. One of them, Frances Goodman’s Ophiophilia (2014), is made of acrylic nails, glue, foam and wire – a coil of snakes that looks fierce from a distance and, up close, is made of the same material as a manicure.
The 2026–27 season pushes in two directions. IMPRINT, on view from 2 October 2026 to 2 April 2028 on Level 2, is an artist-led studio residency in the Koyo Kouoh Atelier that hosts Cape Town publishing collectives – (B)and Wi(d)th, Medupi Publishing and Creative Knowledge Resources – and treats publishing not as an afterthought of art but as its central condition and method, extending it to sound, performance and ephemera. From 11 December 2026 to 15 August 2027, Turning Towards the Sun on Level 4 presents six newly commissioned films by Zeresenay Berhane Mehari, Mati Diop, Robin Coste Lewis, Jim Chuchu, Wanuri Kahiu and The Otolith Group, developed through the African Film and Media Arts Collective led by Julie Mehretu and Mehret Mandefro.
VII · Koyo Kouoh, and a museum that is still being built
The Atelier carries the name of the curator who led the museum for several years: Koyo Kouoh (1967–2025). The museum’s website pairs her name with a line that reads like the institution’s own credo – “Art has the ability to shift perceptions, open minds, and build futures.” – and promotes her curation of the Venice Biennale. It is a reminder that a museum is not finished when its architecture is: it keeps being made by the people who work in it.
The same is true of the building. The museum’s support programmes are written into its fabric: the BMW Centre for Art Education welcomes learners of all ages, and the Atelier gives studio space to emerging Cape Town-based artists. The upper floors of the tower hold a hotel, so the structure still has a life after the galleries close. And the broader district around it, the Silo District, has become the creative centre of the waterfront that once handled grain.
For architects, the lesson is simple to state and hard to follow. A redundant building is not a problem to be solved; it is a material to be edited. Heatherwick Studio kept the things that made the silo interesting – its mass, its grid of tubes, its concrete – and changed only what it had to. The most radical move was a subtraction. The museum is, in effect, a void, and the void is what people remember.
Visiting
Zeitz MOCAA is in the Silo District at the V&A Waterfront, Cape Town. It is open daily, 10:00–18:00 (last entry 17:30), with free one-hour tours Monday to Friday at 12:30 on a first-come basis, booked on arrival. The museum’s own directions are the simplest: look for the concrete silo with the glass rooftop. The OCULAR restaurant and the museum shop are on site.
This feature draws on the published project description of Heatherwick Studio and the Zeitz MOCAA website (Our Story; The Procession; Selections from the Collection; the 2026–2027 season announcement), where the quoted facts – the 42 silos, the five floors of galleries, El Loko’s fritted pattern, the 5.5-metre tubes, the atrium’s corn-grain inspiration, the collection’s size and the exhibition dates – are stated. Photographs are reproduced from those two sites with credit to their owners; the opening year and the hotel in the tower are given as widely reported.