Zeitz MoCAA by Heatherwick Studio

British designer Thomas Heatherwick received no training as an architect—his degrees, from Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal Academy of Art, are in three-dimensional design. What to make, then, of his rapid scaling of the professional barricades and solid landing in the bastion of the global architectural elite? If the recently opened Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MoCAA) in Cape Town is our guide, there are multiple reasons to cheer the incursion. Inside, outside, Zeitz is stunning. Beauty is its own reward, but there’s more. This is one of the most important new public buildings anywhere, and surely one of the most significant in Africa.

Cape Town, routinely referred to as Africa’s most European city, has long drawn international tourists, and its V&A Waterfront, the historic harbor named after Queen Victoria and her son Alfred, is the city’s most visited destination. At one edge rises a nearly 200-foot-high grain elevator and silo that, when completed in 1924, stood as the tallest structure in Sub-Saharan Africa. It was decommissioned in the 1990s.