The Silo Hotel

Accommodation: 3 nights The Silo.

The Silo is a magical space towering above the V&A Waterfront surrounded by the natural wonder of South Africa’s Mother City.

The Silo is being built in the grain elevator portion of the historic grain silo complex occupying six floors above what will become the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA). Zeitz MOCAA will be a contemporary art museum to rival the likes of the Tate Modern in London, MoMA in New York and Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. Zeitz MOCAA is a not-for-profit partnership between the V&A Waterfront and Jochen Zeitz, whose collection forms the Museum’s founding collection. Zeitz MOCAA will open in September 2017.

The building has been designed by Thomas Heatherwick, Founder and Principal of the London-based Heatherwick Studio. Heatherwick Studio was tasked with the transformation of the elevator house and the adjacent storage annex of six rows of seven silos, while carefully retaining its cultural significance and creating a building that will be as synonymous with the Cape Town skyline as the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.

From the outside, the greatest visible change to the building’s original structure will be the addition of pillowed glazing panels, inserted into the geometry of the hotel floors, which will bulge outward as if gently inflated. By night, this will transform the building into a glowing lantern or beacon in the harbour.