“We felt strongly that we needed to give the space a heart,” says the architect Thomas Heatherwick as he stands in the atrium of Africa’s most highly anticipated building, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, which he designed and which will open to the public next week. The building, once a grain silo and, for the better part of a century, the tallest building in sub-Saharan Africa, marks a lot of firsts: It’s Heatherwick’s first project on the continent, his first museum, and the first major contemporary art museum both in Africa and dedicated to African contemporary art.

The “heart” to which Heatherwick refers is the soaring atrium he and his team created by cutting out the middle of the original structure, a grain storage building comprised of some 56 storage silos and an adjacent elevator building. It’s an apt metaphor for this particular building, which carries on its concrete frame the pressure to become the heartbeat of the revitalized V&A Waterfront District and, more broadly, both a cradle and an impetus for an expanded focus on and celebration of this continent’s art on a global scale.

Guests in the atrium. Photo: Iwan Baan

As we stand in the atrium, visitors are buzzing about and an orchestra rehearses in the basement level, the notes from their strings rising up through the vaulted, eavelike upper cutouts that give the space a near-cathedral feel—”We accidentally made a great acoustic space,” Heatherwick says somewhat gleefully after listening for a moment. Its actual inspiration, though, is far more humble.

“When we started working, there was still some original corn from the silo,” Heatherwick recalls. “We managed to get hold of one of the grains, digitally scanned it, enlarged that grain to ten stories high, and used that as the carving pattern.” Construction workers used double-blade handsaws to painstakingly carve the curvaceous inner sanctum from the building, giving visitors a sort of X-ray view into its structure.