![]() ![]() “The silo was our cathedral,” says the company’s development director Mark Noble, “but we had no idea what to put in it.” What to do with the ageing silo had long vexed the V&A Waterfront, the company in charge of the 123 hectares of former docklands, which has been developed piecemeal since the 1990s as an odd mishmash of retail, office and seaside attractions. ![]() If it feels like an amazing atrium with an OK gallery attached, the project’s unusual gestation explains why. Thankfully the basement level has been left as a raw, as-found space for installations, but more of the rugged spirit would have been welcome throughout. The character of the industrial hulk has been banished in favour of white plasterboard walls and suspended grey resin floors, which bounce underfoot with an uneasy cheapness. The resulting spaces are indeed rather utilitarian affairs. As Heatherwick admits, “tubes are quite rubbish spaces for showing art,” so two-thirds of the silos have been swept away to make space for conventional white cube galleries, “dropped in like shoeboxes” either side of the dazzling atrium. The next hurdle was how to make the galleries. For now, Nicholas Hlobo’s dangling creature made of rubber inner-tubes and ribbons gets a bit lost in the soaring geometry. How well it performs its role as a space for “monumental interventions”, like the Tate’s Turbine Hall, remains to be seen. The result, however artificial it may be, is nonetheless a powerful piece of constructed archaeology, the aggregate of the new cylinders contrasting with the old, their edges polished like nougat, while the atrium void plunges through the floor to reveal the basement where conveyor belts once shuttled the grain. The building was essentially made anew before it could be sliced up in a Herculean ballet of jackhammers, diamond rope and double-bladed circular saws. The rickety 1920s concrete tubes, at just 180mm thick, weren’t capable of being chopped up so brutally, so a new 250mm sleeve of concrete had to be cast inside each of the cylinders. Such a gravity-defying feat wasn’t easy – in fact, it wasn’t initially possible. It is a spectacular act of architectural mutilation that makes Gordon Matta-Clark’s penchant for cutting holes in houses look like mere tinkering. In one of his most audacious party tricks to date, Heatherwick has excavated a gigantic ovoid atrium from the centre of the silos, revealing a thrilling space of concrete cylinders that plunge from the ceiling like carved stalactites, through which stairs spiral and glass elevators glide. The building’s guts certainly have the jaw-dropping, selfie-friendly wow factor he was hoping for. In a place that doesn’t have a strong museum-going culture, our challenge was to make compelling innards, to lure people in to see the art.” “But the danger would have been that people would just come to take a selfie and not go inside. “We could have so easily knocked it down and built a big shiny spaceship of a museum instead,” says Thomas Heatherwick, the British designer of the R500m (£28m) Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (Mocaa), the first such institution of its kind in Africa. ![]()
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