The Silo

An extraordinary new luxury hotel in Cape Town.

The Silo Hotel is a magical space towering above the V&A Waterfront surrounded by the natural wonder of South Africa’s Mother City.  The Silo has been 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 exterior of the building was 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 would be synonymous with the Cape Town skyline.

From the outside, the greatest visible change to the building’s original structure is the addition of pillowed glass windows inserted into the geometry of the hotel floors. These windows bulge outward as if gently inflated. By night, this transforms the building into a glowing beacon in the harbour.