Photographer Khoo Guo Jie of Béton Brut has provided us with some new images of Zaha Hadid Architects’ Nanjing International Youth Culture Centre, now nearing completion along the Yangtze river in Hexi New Town, Nanjing’s new central business district.
Occupying a 5.2 hectare site, the complex contains 465,000 square meters of floor space, which includes a hotel, conference center, offices and underground parking, and is part of a larger masterplan by ZHA that will feature a pedestrian bridge linking the plaza with the other side of the river.
“The Culture and Conference Centre masterplan expresses the continuity, fluidity and connectivity between the urban environment of Hexi New Town, the agricultural farmland along the Yangtze river and the rural landscapes of Jiangxinzhou Island,” explain the architects.
The complex consists of two towers rising from a five-story, mixed-use podium. The taller of the towers rises 314 meters (68 floors) and contains a 5-star hotel and office floors, while the 255 meter, 59-story tower will house an additional hotel to accommodate visitors to the conference center below.
The Conference Centre contains a 2,100-seat conference hall, a 500-seat concert hall, a multifunction hall and a VIP area, expressed as individual volumes encircling a central courtyard on the ground level. At higher levels, the elements “merge into a singular whole” to allow pedestrian to traverse the building uninterrupted.
The complex is oriented on the site to create a gradual transition from “the vertical of the urban CBD to the horizontal topography of the river.” This transition is also expressed in the formal representation of the building: the fibre-concrete paneled podium borrows from the fluid language of the river, while the towers connect to the urban streetscape of the new CBD.
Zaha Hadid Architects has revealed its designs for a new central business district for Prague next to the Masaryk railway station.
London-based ZHA – whose figurehead passed away earlier this year – won a competition in 2014 to redevelop the derelict 22,000-square-metre site, in response to the city’s need for more office accommodation.
Its plan is for a series of curved mid-rise structures interspersed with public plazas, aimed at stitching together Prague’s Districts 1, 3 and 8, and creating a new gateway to the city from Václav Havel Airport
“We have developed an urbanism for the site which draws inspiration from our analysis of the city and the site’s dynamic circulation networks,” explained ZHA project architect Craig Kiner.
Renderings show predominantly glazed structures with projecting balconies and golden details. These will vary slightly in scale, to be “compatible” with the city’s existing architecture.
Zaha Hadid Architects presents plans for new Prague business district
A new public square will span the railway lines, creating a connection to Na Florenci street and improving access to the station. Four additional plazas will be dotted across the new district, including at the bus terminus and along the boulevard.
According to Kiner, the design is “sensitive to context, unifying in aspiration and contributes to the urban fabric of Prague”.
The project is backed by Masaryk Station Development (MSD) consortium, which was set up in 2004 by Czech Railways and several private companies but is now majority owned by investment group Penta.
Penta partner Marek Dospiva said the project will “regenerate this site that has been abandoned for decades into a vibrant new central business district with exceptional public spaces”.
Zaha Hadid died at the end of March, after suffering a heart attack while being treated at a Miami hospital. Her firm has vowed to carry on without her under the lead of Patrik Schumacher, who described his former partner as “empowering” and “unprecedented”.
The studio has four projects completing this year, including the Salerno Maritime Terminal unveiled last month. It also recently won a competition for a new building at a technology park near Moscow.
Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) has revealed plans to design and redevelop more than 22,000 square meters of brownfield land in Prague, in a 90,000 square meter development adjacent to the city’s Masaryk Railway Station. ZHA was selected by project partner Penta, an investment company active in ten markets across Europe, as the winner of a 2014 competition for the site. Devising a new central business district, the ZHA plan seeks to integrate with existing means of transit, including suburban and domestic rail services, a bus terminal, Line B of the city’s metro, and a future airport rail link to Vaclav Havel International Airport. Approximately one kilometer from Prague’s central square, the design seeks to create a balance between the horizontality of the railway lines and the verticality and publicness of the Old Town.
The plan intersects with Prague Districts 1, 3, and 8, alleviating the disjunction created by the elevated Wilsonova Highway, which bisects them. Within this context, ZHA has designed buildings that vary in scale and composition in order to generate a harmony with the existing urban fabric. This includes the conceiving of new civic spaces, such as plazas at the main entrance to the railway station, midway along Na Florenci Boulevard, at the corner of the Na Florenci/Opletalova axis, and at the bus terminal in District 8. The development comes as a response to the city’s growing demands for Class A office space in the service and IT sectors.
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Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
“In collaboration with our partners and the city, we have developed an urbanism for the site which draws inspiration from our analysis of the city and the site’s dynamic circulation networks,” says Craig Kiner, Project Associate at ZHA. “[It creates] an architectural response that is sensitive to context, unifying in aspiration and contributes to the urban fabric of Prague.”
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Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
Penta became the part and majority owner of Masaryk Station Development (MDS), which is overseeing the project, in 2011. The company will spend spend CZK 135 million (approx $5.7 million) on reconstruction of the railway station and over CZK 6.5 billion (approx $275 million) on the regeneration project. Phase one of the redevelopment has an anticipated completion of 2020, with all phases being completed by 2022.
From the architect. Inaugurated on 25 April 2016, the new Salerno Maritime Terminal by Zaha Hadid Architects is integral to the city’s urban plan. Begun by Mayor Vincenzo De Luca, now Governor of the Campania Region, and continued under the city’s current Mayor Vincenzo Napoli, the 1993 plan forSalerno targeted the development of essential projects and programs for the social, economic and environmental regeneration of the city. As part of the 1993 plan, Zaha Hadid Architects won the international competition in 2000 to design the new terminal.
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Site Plan
Located on the public quay that extends into Salerno’s working harbor and marina, the new maritime terminal continues the city’s relationship with the sea and establishes new links; connecting Salerno’s rich maritime traditions with its historic urban fabric and beyond to the hills that frame the city.
Like an oyster, the terminal’s hard, asymmetric shell protects the softer elements within; sheltering passengers from the intense Mediterranean sun during the popular tourist season.
The new maritime terminal is composed of three primary interlocking components: administration offices for national border controls and shipping lines; the terminal for international ferries and cruise ships from around the world; and the terminal for the local and regional ferries.
The quayside gently rises as passengers approach the terminal from the city, indicating the gradually sloping path of ramps within the building which raise passengers to the embarking level of large ships and ferries. The terminal’s interior arrangement orientates and leads passengers through a sequence of interior spaces that flow into each other and are organized around focal points such as the restaurant and the waiting lounge.
Local and regional ferry commuters move through the terminal quickly, arriving on ground level and ascending via ramps to reach the upper and vessel entrance. Passengers travelling on international ferries and cruise ships are guided seamlessly through check-in, passport, security and customs controls to their ship. Arriving passengers follow a similar progression through the terminal with the inclusion of the luggage reclaim area.
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Sections
At night, the glow of the terminal near the harbour entrance will act as a lighthouse to the port, welcoming visitors to the city.
The new terminal operates, both functionally and visually, as a smooth transition between land and sea; a coastal land formation that mediates between solid and liquid.
From its terraces and windows, the terminal offers spectacular views of the Amalfi Coast, the Gulf ofSalerno and the Cilento. Positano, Capri, Paestum and Pompei are also nearby. The new terminal will greatly improve the accessibility and experience for visitors to the region’s renowned cultural attractions, coastline and countryside.
The new Salerno Maritime Terminal will enable the port of Salerno to increase arrivals of ferry and cruise ships by 500,000 additional passengers each year, which would create up to 2,000 new jobs in the city’s hospitality, services and retail sectors.
From the architect. The skyline of Zaha Hadid’s CityLifeMilano housing complex is defined and characterized by a sinuous fluid line. Residences are comprised of seven curved buildings of varying heights, from 5 to 13 floors. The distinctive architectural elements include a serpentine movement of the curved balconies and the profile of the roofs, which provide a soft and elegant shape for all of the top-floor penthouses, complete with extensive covered terraces. Construction of the residential complex began in august 2009, with delivery of the first apartments scheduled for 2013.
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Site
Great care has been given to the site and building orientation, taking into account environmental and comfort requirements so that most apartments face south-east and at the same time allocate the best views from the terraces, towards the city or the public park.
Façade materials – fiber concrete panels and natural wood panels – emphasize the complex’s volumetric movement and at the same time give a private and domestic quality to the interior of the residential courtyard. The interiors open onto extensive terraces. All of the apartments feature structural and plant solutions that can be easily adapted to individual needs. Each of the homes is different from the others in terms of size, exposure and layout: from two- rooms to large family apartments and twin-level penthouses.
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Section
At ground level, the double-height lobbies are flooded with light by large openings stretching from floor to ceiling, designed to confer strong visual continuity with the park. Access to all stairwells is provided by main and service lifts. The underground parking areas lead directly to the individual buildings with easy, convenient and secure access.
The Iraqi-born British Architect Dame Zaha Hadid, DBE (1950-2016) has died aged 65, in Miami, Florida. According to reports from the BBC, Hadid was being treated in hospital for bronchitis when she suffered a heart attack. Earlier this year she became the first sole woman to receive the RIBA Royal Gold Medal at a ceremony in London.
Read on for the official statement from Zaha Hadid Architects:
It is with great sadness that Zaha Hadid Architects have confirmed that Dame Zaha Hadid, DBE died suddenly in Miami in the early hours of this morning. She had contracted bronchitis earlier this week and suffered a sudden heart attack while being treated in hospital.
Zaha Hadid was widely regarded to be the greatest female architect in the world today. Born in Baghdad in 1950, she studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before starting her architectural journey in 1972 at the Architectural Association in London.
By 1979 she had established her own practice in London – Zaha HadidArchitects – garnering a reputation across the world for her ground-breaking theoretical works including The Peak in Hong Kong (1983), the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin (1986) and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994).
Working with office partner Patrik Schumacher, her interest was in the interface between architecture, landscape, and geology; which her practice integrates with the use of innovative technologies often resulting in unexpected and dynamic architectural forms.
Zaha Hadid’s first major built commission, one that affirmed her international recognition, was the Vitra Fire Station in Weil Am Rhein, Germany (1993); subsequent notable projects including the MAXXI: Italian National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome (2009), theLondon Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympic Games (2011) and the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku (2013) illustrate her quest for complex, fluid space. Buildings such as the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (2003) and the Guangzhou Opera House in China (2010) have also been hailed as architecture that transforms our ideas of the future with visionary spatial concepts defined by advanced design, material and construction processes.
In 2004, Zaha Hadid became the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize. She twice won the UK’s most prestigious architecture award, the RIBA Stirling Prize: in 2010 for the MAXXI Museum in Rome, a building for the staging of 21st century art, the distillation of years of experimentation, a mature piece of architecture conveying a calmness that belies the complexities of its form and organisation; and the Evelyn Grace Academy, a unique design, expertly inserted into an extremely tight site, that shows the students, staff and local residents they are valued and celebrates the school’s specialism throughout its fabric, with views of student participation at every turn.
Zaha Hadid’s other awards included the Republic of France’s Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale and in 2012, Zaha Hadid was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She was made Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Fellow of the American Institute of Architecture.
She held various academic roles including the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; the Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois, School of Architecture. Hadid also taught studios at Columbia University, Yale University and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Zaha Hadid was recently awarded the RIBA’s 2016 Royal Gold Medal, the first woman to be awarded the prestigious honour in her own right. On the occasion, Sir Peter Cook wrote the following citation:
“In our current culture of ticking every box, surely Zaha Hadid succeeds, since (to quote the Royal Gold Medal criteria) she is someone “who has made a significant contribution to the theory or practice of architecture…. for a substantial body of work rather than for work which is currently fashionable.” Indeed her work, though full of form, style and unstoppable mannerism, possesses a quality that some of us might refer to as an impeccable ‘eye’: which we would claim is a fundamental in the consideration of special architecture and is rarely satisfied by mere ‘fashion’.
And surely her work is special. For three decades now, she has ventured where few would dare: if Paul Klee took a line for a walk, then Zaha took the surfaces that were driven by that line out for a virtual dance and then deftly folded them over and then took them out for a journey into space. In her earlier, ‘spiky’ period there was already a sense of vigour that she shared with her admired Russian Suprematists and Constructivists – attempting with them to capture that elusive dynamic of movement at the end of the machine age.
Necessarily having to disperse effort through a studio production, rather than being a lone artist, she cottoned–on to the potential of the computer to turn space upon itself. Indeed there is an Urban Myth that suggests that the very early Apple Mac ‘boxes’ were still crude enough to plot the mathematically unlikely – and so Zaha with her mathematics background seized upon this and made those flying machine projections of the Hong Kong Peak project and the like. Meanwhile, with paintings and special small drawings Zaha continued to lead from the front. She has also been smart enough to pull in some formidable computational talent without being phased by its ways.
Thus the evolution of the ‘flowing’ rather than spikey architecture crept up upon us in stages, as did the scale of her commissions, but in most cases, they remained clear in identity and control. When you entered the Fire Station at Vitra, you were conscious of being inside one of those early drawings and yes, it could be done. Yet at perhaps its highest, those of us lucky enough to see the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku in the flesh, can surely never have been in such a dream-like space, with its totality, its enormous internal ramp and dart-like lights seeming to have come from a vocabulary that lies so far beyond the normal architecture that we assess or rationalize.
So we are presenting her with this Medal as a British Institution: and as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire: thus she might seem to be a member of our British Establishment. Yet in reality, many of our chattering classes and not a few fellow architects have treated her with characteristic faint praise, and when she heroically won the Cardiff Opera House competition, blocking the scheme. Or when we awarded her the RIBA Stirling Prize for the school in South London – her second win in a row – we, the jury, were loudly derided by a number of distinguished architects. Of course, in our culture of circumspection and modesty her work is certainly not modest, and she herself is the opposite of modest. Indeed her vociferous criticism of poor work or stupidity recalls the line-side comments of the tennis player John McEnroe. Yet this is surely characteristic of the seriousness with which she takes the whole business: sloppiness and waywardness pain her and she cannot play the comfy
British game of platitudinous waffle that is the preferred cushion adopted by many people of achievement or power. Her methods and perhaps much of her psychology remain Mesopotamian and not a little scary: but certainly clear.
As a result, it is perhaps a little lonely there up at the top, surrounded now by some very considerable talent in the office, but feared somewhat and distanced from the young. Yet in private Zaha is gossipy and amusing, genuinely interested in the work of talented colleagues who do very different architecture such as Steven Holl, and she was the first to bring to London talent such as Lebbeus Woods or Stanley Saiotowitz. She is exceptionally loyal to her old friends: many of whom came from the Alvin Boyarsky period of the Architectural Association: which seems to remain as her comfort zone and golden period of friendship. Encouraged and promoted at an early age by Boyarsky, she has rewarded the AA with an unremitting loyalty and fondness for it.
The history of the Gold Medal must surely include many major figures who commanded a big ship and one ponders upon the operation involved that gets such strong concepts as the MAXXI in Rome – in which the power of organization is so clear – or the Bergisel Ski Jump in Innsbruck where dynamic is at last captured – or the Aquatics Centre for the London Olympics where the lines diving boards were as fluid as the motion of the divers – made into reality. And she has done it time and time again in Vienna, Marseilles, Beijing and Guangzhou. Never has she been so prolific, so consistent. We realize that Kenzo Tange and Frank Lloyd Wright could not have drawn every line or checked every joint, yet Zaha shares with them the precious role of towering, distinctive and relentless influence upon all around her that sets the results apart from the norm. Such self-confidence is easily accepted in film-makers and football managers, but causes some architects to feel uncomfortable, maybe they’re secretly jealous of her unquestionable talent. Let’s face it, we might have awarded the medal to a worthy, comfortable character. We didn’t, we awarded it to Zaha: larger than life, bold as brass and certainly on the case.
Our Heroine. How lucky we are to have her in London.”
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Zaha Hadid received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in February 2016. Image via RIBA
Jane Duncan, President of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), who awarded Hadid the Royal Gold Medal, has said:
This is absolutely terrible news. Dame Zaha Hadid was an inspirational woman, and the kind of architect one can only dream of being. Visionary and highly experimental, her legacy despite her young age, is formidable. She leaves behind a body of work from buildings to furniture, footwear and cars, that delight and astound people all around the world. It was only last month that I had the enviable task of awarding Zaha the 2016 Royal Gold Medal for architecture – she was delighted to receive the recognition and adds the medal to an amazing collection of awards, not least winning the RIBA Stirling Prize two years running. The world of architecture has lost a star today.
Details of Zaha Hadid’s memorial service will be announced shortly.
Zaha Hadid Architects has teamed up with Plus Architecture to design their first tower inMelbourne. The 54-story mixed use skyscraper is designed as a series of “stacked vases” supported by an “elegant colonnade of sculptural, curved columns” that “embody and emulate the finest examples of historic architecture” in the area. If approved, the proposal will add a mix of retail, commercial and residential programs to its site at 582-606 Collins Street.
Zaha Hadid Architects has proposed an office tower in Beijing that is said to have the “world’s tallest atrium.” As the Architects’ Journal reports, the Leeza SOHO project features a 200-meter-high atrium that extends the building’s full height, visually splitting the cylindrical structure in two. If built, it will be anchored by an underground promenade that connects to a subway station below and public park to the west.
Update: On September 1st, the Japan Sport Council launched a new competition to find another design for Japan’s New National Stadium – this time for a design and build project with more stringent cost restrictions. Today, contractor Nikken Sekkei and Zaha Hadid Architects have confirmed that they will be re-entering the contest together, bringing forward work from their original design. “Our firm is certain that retaining the team of Design Supervisor and designers will deliver the best National Stadium, and we have invited Zaha Hadid Architects to join the design team” said Nikken Sekkei in a statement. “Applying this knowledge and experience of the project, this team can further develop the design to the new brief as a cost-effective proposal to realize the world’s best National Stadium.” The article below was originally published on August 26th. In mid-July, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe declared that ZHA’s design for a New National stadium would
.jpg?resize=600%2C9999 "Zaha Hadid Architects Release Video Presentation and Report on New National Stadium in Tokyo")
.jpg "© Zaha Hadid Architects. Image by Methanoia")
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