Grain silos in Cape Town converted to feed the soul as museum

On Cape Town's waterfront at the southern tip of Africa, the world's biggest museum of contemporary art from across the continent is being carved from a conglomeration of concrete tubes nine storeys high.

The US$50 million project to transform the grim functionality of 42 disused colonial grain silos into an ultra-modern tribute to African creativity is driven by an international team of art experts and architects.

For Mark Coetzee, executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, the project is the fulfilment of a pledge he made to himself a quarter of a century ago. "It has been my life dream to build a contemporary art museum in Africa," says the South African-born former director of the Rubell Family Collection in Miami.

"When I left Cape Town 25 years ago I vowed to return only when I had the skills and the relationships to make this happen."

For British architect Thomas Heatherwick, whose acclaimed projects worldwide include the Olympic Cauldron for the London Games in 2012, it was a stimulating challenge. "How do you turn 42 vertical concrete tubes into a place to experience contemporary culture?" he asks. "We could either fight a building made of concrete tubes or enjoy its tube-iness."

An elliptical section will be hollowed out from the centre of the nine-storey building to create a grand atrium that will be filled with light from a glass roof, the designers say. Some silo chambers will be carved open at ground level to accommodate exhibition galleries, while others will house elevators.

This vision is difficult to comprehend on a visit to the site on the Victoria and Albert Waterfront where workers, reduced to ant size by the scale of the industrial silos, are in the early stages of a project due for completion in late 2016. But architects' drawings illustrate a transformation worthy of showcasing the art of a continent riding a wave of international enthusiasm.