British designer Thomas Heatherwick was selected to convert a 1920's granary in Cape Town, Africa into the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MoCAA). The granary consist of 42 silos

    The MoCAA is scheduled to open in the later part 2016. The museum will include 80 galleries, 18 education rooms, and a rooftop sculpture garden.



Heatherwick has never designed a museum, but his designs have been featured in the 2012 London Olympics as well as the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.

“Unlike many conversions of historic buildings which have grand spaces ready to be re-purposed, this building has none. “Rather than strip out the evidence of the building’s industrial heritage, we wanted to find a way to enjoy and celebrate it. We could either fight a building made of concrete tubes or enjoy its tube-iness,” commented Heatherwick about the challenge of preservation and practicality.

I like the idea of converting something old and no longer in use to something new and practical. I admire Heatherwick's intentions to preserve the historical essence of the build, for I  think making that effort will add a unique layered quality to the design of the museum. In reading this article and thinking of ideas for this marking period's home project, I have thought about mingling old to make new. What exactly that entails--well, I haven't gotten there yet.

    So far I've only been to two of the metal-smithing workshops at the Visual Arts Center. During the first class we learned about the different tools and types of metal we would be handling. After watching a slide show of metal sculpture we started our own wire sculptures.
    Essentially, we were 'drawing' with wire. I never really thought about it that way until sitting in the class and looking at the examples. The ironic thing is that many of the examples looked like attempts to make the sculptures appear as sketches of sort, while we try to make our drawings appear 3-dimensional.