The Zeitz Mocaa (Museum of Contemporary Art Africa), which opened to the public in Cape Town end of September 2017, has become the largest museum on the African continent, with more than 100 exhibition halls over 6,000 sq. metres. Lina Ghotmeh, co-author of the National Museum of Estonia, gives an enthusiastic appraisal of the rehabilitation led by British designer Thomas Heatherwick, who has used surgical precision to transform a disused grain silo into one of Cape Town’s main attractions.

On the shores of the Atlantic, overlooked by granite mountains, in the oldest working port of South Africa, in Cape Town, sits a silent witness to international trade: a nine-storey concrete grain silo. At 57 meters, it was the tallest building in Sub-Saharan Africa when it was built in 1921. A striking collection of multiple concrete cylinders, it is like a watch tower looking out over the ocean. This machine of a building was home to a whole chain of procedures: weighing, cleaning, bagging, storing and distributing corn, only to eject it again, to be loaded onto the world’s cargo ships.

Read Lina Ghotmeh‘s full article in AA 422, December 2017.