In 2007, Zaha Hadid Architects won a competition to design an Innovation Tower for Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Six years later, students and faculty are beginning to settle into the glacial, 130,000 square foot, 250 foot tall design-education center as it nears completion. The space-age, striated structure will be a “creative multidisciplinary environment,” that, according […]
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Zaha Hadid Architects has unveiled its design for a 40,000-seat soccer stadium to rise in the Arabian kingdom of Qatar. The project is slated to be complete in time for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, and is only one of several such facilities that the oil-rich nation plans to build—in addition to miles of roads, […]
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Learn design with Doug Patt at his live virtual webcam studio. http://howtoarchitect.com/designstudio.
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Twenty of the world’s biggest architects were asked to design on quite a small scale last month. Cathedral Group commissioned architect-designed dollhouses for a charity auction to benefit KIDS, a United Kingdom-based organization supporting disabled children. A Dolls’ House sold the interesting toys a few days ago at Bonhams in London and Zaha Hadid’s 30-inch-by-30-inch, […]
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Zaha Hadid Architects have designed the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Description
The Heydar Aliyev Center hosts a variety of cultural programs, its design is a departure from the rigid and often monumental architecture of the former Soviet Union that is so prevalent in Baku, aspiring instead to express the sensibilities and diversity of Azeri culture.
The Center’s design establishes a continuous, fluid relationship between its surrounding plaza and the building’s interior. The plaza, as the ground surface, accessible to all, rises to envelop an equally public interior and define a sequence of event spaces within. Undulations, folds, and inflections modify this surface to create an architectural landscape that performs a multitude of functions: welcoming, embracing, and directing visitors throughout the center; blurring the conventional differentiation between architecture and landscape, interior and exterior.
Fluidity in architecture is not new to the region. The continuous calligraphic scripts and patterning of historical Islamic architecture flow from carpets to walls, walls to ceilings, ceilings to domes; establishing seamless relationships and blurring distinctions between architectural elements and the ground they inhabit. The Center’s design relates to this historical understanding of architecture, not through the use of mimicry or a limiting adherence to the iconography of the past, but with a firmly contemporary interpretation.
Architect: Zaha Hadid Architects
Photography: Helene Binet, Luke Hayes, Iwan Baan, Hufton and Crow
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