When “Provocations: The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio” opens June 24 at the Cooper-Hewitt in New York, many audiences will be introduced to a project that’s especially close to lauded architect Thomas Heatherwick’s heart: the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town.
“It’s one of the projects we’re proudest of and most excited about, because it’s such an unusual typology,” Heatherwick said in an interview in Cape Town last month, where he was checking in on progress at the site. “It’s a cliché to say it, but it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing to be asked to do.”
Heatherwick was tasked with designing the continent’s first major museum dedicated to contemporary African art, set within the confines of a historic grain silo in Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront district. Reimagining a complex of 42 100-foot-tall, 18-foot-diameter concrete tubes into a global art destination is quite a challenge, but Heatherwick’s groundbreaking design has his team carving out sinuous lines in the tubes to forge an airy atrium to display works on a massive scale. The building will be crowned by more than 100 specially crafted pillowed-glass panels, each of which reportedly cost more than a BMW X5.
“We’re working on many projects that are construction projects. But this project is largely a destruction project, because we’re cutting away so much,” said Heatherwick.
Amid the destruction Heatherwick is dedicated to preserving the building’s spirit and updating it in a new context. “Often people are scared of heritage, and then you end up with these dull, predictable things,” he said. “The kind of generation who built these structures, they had ambition and confidence.”
Built in the 1920s, the silo was the country’s tallest building and was for decades a center for agriculture. “We’re respecting it but also having the confidence to engage with it and not get paralyzed,” Heatherwick said. “The great benefit we get is a building oozing soulfulness, which new buildings never have.”
There was perhaps no better setting than Cape Town’s Design Indaba conference last year to unveil his vision to the public: With an audience of design devotees, Heatherwick generated a buzz more typically associated with Bruce Springsteen than with an architect.
The $50 million complex will house German businessman (and former Puma chairman) Jochen Zeitz’s collection of modern African art—the world’s largest—across 100,000 square feet, along with a 28-room luxury hotel . The museum is set to be completed by the end of 2016.
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