National Treasury

Cape Town has gained another major cultural asset in the form of the new Norval Foundation, a remarkable destination museum of art

- Dayle Kavonic

To try to express the magnitude of the Mother City’s new Norval Foundation in Tokai by simply cataloguing its many parts would be doing a great disservice to the whole. It’s not simply a high-profile art museum adjoining a sculpture garden, restaurant and bar, amphitheatre, gift shop and research library. There is something much bigger and more significant at play here: a unifying thread rooted in custodianship and conservation – of art, of nature and of heritage.

It’s a cultural and ecological sanctuary of sorts, and you sense this from the moment you step inside the foundation’s monumental pavilion, flanked on one side by the urban whir of a main road and the other by the surprising stillness of a revived wetland. ‘When I visited for the first time, there was something about the lay of the land and the sensitivity of the building that struck me,’ says Elana Brundyn, Norval Foundation’s executive director. It was enough to pull her in – straight off the back of years spent preparing for the launch of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) in the Silo District of the V&A Waterfront – to help local businessman Louis Norval realise his dream of making art more accessible to the public.