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Cape Town’s jewel of a building sitting pretty at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront continues to attract global attention.

Whenever I step into the bewildering atrium at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) I feel like I am a part of something utterly fascinating.

Taking note of the journey that the building has been on, winding its way into a modern South Africa and posturing itself out of a history of colonial trauma, is truly enthralling.

As a 1920s grain silo, it was once the tallest building in sub-Saharan Africa until the mid-1970s, before it was decommissioned in the 1990s.

Now, it’s been repurposed and transformed into the country’s most impressive art museum, collecting and collaborating art from across the African continent and its diaspora.

This is just one of the architectural tales chronicled in the new Gestalten book by Ruth Lang, called Building for Change: The Architecture of Creative Reuse.

BBC Culture‘s new series Designed to Last delved into the book’s pages to explore how creative reuse could be the way forward for designing spaces around the world, picking out 10 of the world’s most ingenious buildings.

It revealed the ingenious ways that former factories, sugar mills, grain silos, and market halls have found new footing amidst “an increasingly urgent global challenge” – which is not merely abandoning buildings once they’re no longer needed.

The Zeitz MOCAA is, of course, a point of pride.

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa

“The agricultural structure is an emblem of South Africa’s colonial history as well as another chapter in its post-Apartheid future,” according to Building for Change. “Its transformation fractures these historic associations without denying them, to form what… is renowned as the world’s largest museum dedicated to contemporary African and diaspora art.”

London’s Heatherwick Studio carved into eight of the 42 reinforced concrete tubes that made up the grain lift and storage annex, to form 80 galleries across six levels, as well as a huge void at the centre “within which the nature and complexity of these spaces can finally be appreciated”.

Alila Yangshuo Hotel, Guangxi, China

Similarly, this abandoned 1960s sugar mill has been converted into a luxury hotel by Vector Architects.

What makes it markedly different to the Zeitz MOCAA is that it is surrounded by ancient villages in an ecologically-protected setting:

The landscape is as much a feature of the site as the buildings, and a structural truss – previously used for transferring sugar cane to the boats on the Li River below – has been stripped back to its functional concrete core, which now frames a newly-built pool.

The original construction of the buildings has been mostly kept and simplified, with one wing of the hotel acting as a sound barrier to the highway that runs alongside the site.

EOI Melilla Language School, Melilla, Spain

Melilla borders Morocco, making this a spot for diverse cultures to collide:

When its central market building closed in 2003, it “created a rupture in the neighbourhood’s cohesion”, according to Building for Change, as the 90-year-old commercial centre was a “social catalyst, connecting the city’s Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities”.

Ángel Verdasco Arquitectos won a 2008 competition seeking a design that embodied the market’s social value, their proposal transforming the site into a music academy, a language school and an educational centre for adults – providing “cross-cultural connectivity” that offers Melilla’s different communities a place to interact.

The design concept was to build on “the memories and identity of the market, which might otherwise have been swept away” to create something that fosters multiculturalism:

Castle Acre Water Tower, Norfolk, UK

“Built in 1952, this water tower in Norfolk, England, wasn’t originally deemed worthy of saving by local authorities,” according to Building for Change. “Previously housed on an airfield, it was subsequently auctioned as scrap.” Luckily, it was rescued by new owners, who converted the tower into their home.

The environment was top of mind for this design, making (re)use of waste materials, with the unit clad in recycled aluminium.

Plastic panels and the stair tower’s balustrade were made from steel tie rods that were removed from the tank:

For the other architectural gems making a name for themselves thanks to their ingenious repurposing design, head here.

[source:bbc]