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British designer has unveiled plans to turn a former grain silo at Cape Town's historic docks into a new gallery for African art

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Main picture: Heatherwick Studio

British designer Thomas Heatherwick has designed a new gallery of African art the V&A Waterfront complex in Cape Town, South Africa.

The project will transform a former grain silo at Cape Town's docks into a new home for the Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), one of the world's foremost collections of contemporary art from Africa.

The brief for the project asked Heatherwick Studio to 'reimagine the Grain Silo Complex at the V&A Waterfront with an architectural intervention inspired by its own historic character', according to a press release from the V&A Waterfront.

Picture: Heatherwick Studio

The R500m (£28m) redevelopment project was announced in November 2013 as a partnership between the V&A Waterfront and Jochen Zeitz, the ex-Puma CEO and Chairman who has given his collection of African Art to the museum 'in perpetuity'.

According to the V&A Waterfront, Heatherwick's design will 'retain and honour the historic fabric and soul of the building while transforming the interior into a unique, cutting-edge space to house the Zeitz Museum'.

Taking on the project, Heatherwick Studio was faced with a building containing 42 33metre-high concrete tubes each with a diameter of 5.5 metres, with no open space.

The solution was to carve galleries and a central circulation space from the silo's cellular concrete structure to create a spacious, cathedral-like central atrium filled with light from an overhead glass roof.

Picture: Heatherwick Studio

Explaining this approach, Heatherwick says: 'Our thoughts wrestled with the extraordinary physical facts of the building. There is no large open space within the densely packed tubes and it is not possible to experience these volumes from inside. Rather than strip out the evidence of the building's industrial heritage, we wanted to find a way to enjoy and celebrate it. We could either fight a building made of concrete tubes or enjoy its "tube-iness"'.

The collection will be exhibited in 9,500 sq m of custom-designed space spread over nine floors, of which 6,000 sq m will be dedicated exhibition space.

There will be 80 galleries, 18 education areas, a rooftop sculpture garden, state of the art storage and conservation area, and Centres for Performative Practice, the Moving Image, Curatorial Excellence and Education.

Heatherwick Studios has designed all the necessary amenities for a public institution of this scale including bookstores, a restaurant and bar, coffee shop, orientation rooms, a donors' room, fellows' room and various reading rooms.

The building's collection of old underground tunnels will be reengineered to create unusual education and site specific spaces for artists to dialogue with the original structure.