It is a strange but inescapable fact that a single building can transform a city. Sydney has never felt remotely the same since the opening of the Opera House, nor has Bilbao after the debut of Frank Gehry’s titanium-clad masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum. Both places were suddenly perceived to be more important, more cultivated, more complex. Even London, scarcely a cultural desert, gained a new aspect to its multifaceted personality with the inauguration of Tate Modern in 2000. The city of Shakespeare and Dickens and Sherlock Holmes acquired a new veneer of cool when augmented by one of the world’s preeminent museums of contemporary art. And now it’s Cape Town’s turn.