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BUILDING PROJECTS


ROYAL PORTFOLIO HOTEL CAPE TOWN


South African carving


The transformation of a historic Cape Town grain silo into a contemporary art museum topped with a hotel involved carving out the inside to form an elliptical atrium, and covering the facade with glittering glass pillows. Stephen Cousins reports


W


hen architects Heatherwick Studio were approached to transform a historic grain


silo building in Cape Town harbour into a spacious new museum for contemporary art, it was faced with an inflexible industrial concrete structure comprising a densely-packed network of 33 metre-high concrete tubes. The 42 cylinders, formerly used for storing grain, each had a diameter of just 5.5 metres and were entirely unsuitable for use as functional gallery spaces, or indeed access by humans. The studio’s ingenious solution was to devise a form of architectural surgery, slicing into the structure to form a large elliptical central atrium, capped by a glass roof, and a network of 80 other gallery spaces.


The architecture is like a 3D anatomy lesson exposing the different


layers inside Stepan Martinovsky, project leader, Heatherwick Studio


The exterior of the building would remain largely intact, to pay tribute to the original industrial design, apart from a series of twinkling jewel-like faceted windows that light up at night like a lighthouse.


Stepan Martinovsky, project leader at Heatherwick Studio tells ADF: “Visitors entering the museum will understand in a single glance the cellular structure of the original building, the material it was made


ADF OCTOBER 2017 WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK


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