Cape Town - His eyes light up as he looks around the lofty warehouse. Pillars break up the dimly-lit space and grain hoppers dangle from the ceiling. The interior is almost like a cathedral’s nave, but scattered bits of rusted machinery and warning signs on the walls reveal the grain silo’s true colours.
“This is it. We are carrying a lot of this through to the future,” says lead designer Thomas Heatherwick, gesturing to the echoing space around him.
Retaining the history of one of the V&A Waterfront’s oldest and tallest buildings – once the tallest in sub-Saharan Africa – is something of an obsession for the architect, who is heading up a team tasked with seeing through one of the area’s biggest projects.
A R500-million redesign will see construction crews transform the now-derelict grain silo – a hulking cream concrete structure that looms over the Clock Tower precinct – into one of South Africa’s most ambitious contemporary art museums.
Yesterday construction finally began, a moment that has been preceded by two years of planning and experimentation to balance the needs of artists, architects and engineers.
It is set to be completed by March 2016.
There was a buzz of excitement as Waterfront chief executive David Green stood up to address the audience that had gathered in the future lobby of the building.
“The silo building has always represented a conundrum,” he said.
For the past 10 years it has stood abandoned, the space around it used as cheap parking for Clock Tower precinct employees before transformation of the Silo District began in 2010.
When it was built in 1921 it was the hub of activity. Trucks from across the country would deliver skips of grain that would be stored in the building’s 10-storey silos, before being shipped off from the nearby port.
It was essentially a giant storage room.
But as demand for the product tapered off, the stores emptied and the employees left to find work elsewhere.
Over 57 metres of towering concrete stood in stasis, collecting dust and pigeon droppings.
Recently an unlikely sounding idea began to take shape. For a long time German entrepreneur Jochen Zeitz had been collecting art.
Around 25 years ago, he bought his first Warhol. This was followed by a trip to Africa, something he would repeat every other year, picking up new pieces on every trip.
“I didn’t feel like I was a collector at the time,” he says. “I felt if you want to be a collector you need to have a purpose.”
After meeting the Waterfront chief executive and seeing the silo for the first time, that purpose started to become apparent. The Waterfront had its solution, the businessman – a former chief at Puma – had his exhibition. Using art to breathe new life into an old building just seemed to fit.
This was when Thomas Heatherwick, of Heatherwick Studio in London, was roped in. The architect’s firm specialises in innovative designs, from the fiery Olympic Cauldron during the London 2012 Games to the UK Pavilion which was decorated with awards during the Shanghai World Expo in 2010.
Heatherwick was the youngest practitioner to be appointed a Royal Designer for Industry, and was later awarded the London Design Medal. He is now working on a new distillery in the south of England and an urban design plan east of Hong Kong.
The silo project was always going to be ambitious, as Green points out: “This building was never designed for human habitation.”
Almost on cue a gull squawks outside.
Heatherwick says approaching the project was a big challenge, but when he first saw the building he also saw its potential.
While the large team that he formed part of had different opinions, there was one agreement – that the renovation would have to pay homage to the building’s roots. This led to the inclusion in the team of the silo’s former manager.
It spawned novel ideas, such as incorporating the massive silos as part of the structure, but knocking out the dividing walls to turn the area into a giant multi-floor atrium with art on every level.
Team member Mark Noble says this was made possible through countless experiments and would essentially be a rebuild.
The basement, which today is nothing but a precarious drop into a rubble-strewn and waterlogged space, will become an education centre, connected under the silos with a series of straight tunnels.
The warehouse, with its giant hoppers – where skips were filled with grain – will become the lobby/elevator room. And at the centre of the lobby, flanked by a set of winding stairs, will be a giant ear of wheat.
This is the ultimate homage, says Heatherwick.
“You literally had billions of grains pouring out of these hoppers. Here you have a single grain, carved into the heart of this building.”
The architect’s passion is shared by the museum’s curator, Mark Coetzee, who in many ways considers the building as much a piece of art as the works that will appear inside.
“This is not just an exhibition, it’s a site. Gone are the days you can just have art for art’s sake, you need to tell a story.”
He said the history of the building would give the paintings a new context, a story that that would essentially make the exhibition unique.
“I think we came into the planning with a vision and we had to adjust to the needs of the engineers and the architects…
“In the end I don’t think it’s a compromise, I think this collaboration has made it better.”
He compares the building’s significance to the Tate Modern in London, a gallery that is housed in the former Bankside Power Station on the south bank of the Thames, and still resembles this from the outside.
Inside, steel girders stretch between taupe walls and over concrete floors. Coetzee said there were many similarities with the silo.
Over 100 bits of machinery and equipment will be salvaged and exhibited in the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa or included as part of the architecture.
The Zeitz Collection is expected to occupy the building by November 2016, with the museum set to officially open in 2017. - Kieran Legg, Cape Argus
Mark Coetzee, originally from Cape Town, is an established figure on the international art scene. An artist, writer, art historian and now predominantly a curator, his career has included positions as the director of the Rubell Family Collection in Miami and the programme director of PUMAVision.
Meet the designer
Thomas Heatherwick, who founded and now heads his own design company, Heatherwick Studio, is a decorated architect. He is an honorary fellow at the Royal Institute of British Architects, a Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum and has been awarded honorary doctorates from a number of universities.
Meet the collector
It's a title that German Jochen Zeitz took 25 years to adopt, but now he is the man behind the extensive collection that will be showcased in the museum once it is done. The entrepreneur’s company, The Zeitz Collection, has a strict mandate to scour Africa to collect and preserve contemporary culture.