Showing posts with label Zaha Hadid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zaha Hadid. Show all posts

Friday, June 12, 2009

Zaha Hadid Wins Cairo Competition


The 1,530,000 sq ft Cairo Expo City near the airport will comprise a major international exhibition and conference centre with business hotel. A further office tower and a shopping centre are also proposed.

According to Hadid, the undulating design was inspired by the natural topography of the Nile Valley.

‘As the exhibition spaces require the greatest degree of flexibility, we wanted to ensure that all the public spaces and formal composition of Cairo Expo City relate to the surrounding Egyptian landscape.’ said Hadid. ‘Along the great rivers of the region, most particularly the Nile, there is a powerful dynamic - a constant flow between the water and the land - which extends to incorporate the neighboring buildings and landscapes. For the Cairo Expo City design, we worked to capture that seamlessness and fluidity in an urban architectural context.’

Work to start clearing the site will begin in October. Hadid will be working together with engineering consultants Buro Happold. - www.architectsjournal.co.uk/5203232.article

Though I think this is a very beautiful design, I am a little skeptical of it's feasibility structurally and financially. I think that Zaha has created, like she always does, another site intervention to stick out and proclaim her apparent greatness.



Images obtained from: www.architectsjournal.co.uk

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Zaha's New Shoes

London based architect Zaha Hadid is known for her very conceptual, unique and curvilinear designs with her new project being no exception. The project set to take off this July "explores futuristic vessels of movement in relation to the human body" ie she is designing a new pair of shoes!

Zaha is collaborating with French apparel company LACOSTE to produce this new prototype to feature unisex calf leather boots that wrap and "encapsulate" the foot from sole to ankle to leg in an continuous and fluid manner. The shoe design for lady's is more expressive of this apparent "leg wrapping" as it reaches up to the calf (top left) while the men's hugs the upper ankle. “The design expression behind the collaboration with LACOSTE footwear allows the evolution of dynamic fluid grids,” said Hadid, according to a official statement from LACOSTE. “When wrapped around the shape of a foot, these expand and contract to negotiate and adapt to the body ergonomically. In doing so a landscape emerges, undulating and radiating as it merges seamlessly with the body.”

The limited edition of only 850 pairs of Zaha's new LACOSTE shoes will be available this July in high end boutiques in Paris London and Milan in black and purple for women and black and navy blue for men.

Contrary to my initial assumptions, this is not Zaha's first crack at the fashion world as she has already designed a pair of "Eco-friendly" rubber shoes with Brazilian label MELISSA in the summer of 2008 but this has not been very successful to date. These were overpriced at about $500 a pair and extremely horrid to look at but she seems to have done better with her new designs which according to sources came from exploring "digitized interpretations” of the LACOSTE crocodile logo. I'm not sure what these cost but it will be safe to say that will not be in the window of your neighborhood Macy's any time soon.





Article info and images obtained from: blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/archives/2517
For more info on Zaha's MELISSA's designs, check: www.inhabitat.com/2008/08/06/zaha-hadid-turns-shoe-designer-teams-up-with-melissa/

Monday, March 16, 2009

Bridging Inspiration- Zaha, Calatrava and SRG Partnership

Portland firm SRG partnership is keeping some very good company in the March issue of Architectural Record. In a long continuing-education feature devoted to pedestrian bridges, SRG’s design for elliptical span at Seattle’s Museum of Flight is one of three projects featured, and the other two are by a couple of the most famous architects in the world: Zaha Hadid and Santiago Calatrava (both of whom should be considered for the Columbia River Crossing).

The Seattle branch of SRG, headed by Rick Zieve, FAIA, came up with the $6.4 million bridge design, which is intended to mimic the forms of jet plane contrails.

As Joann Gonchar writes in Record, “The bridge’s primary span is a 200-foot-long tube truss, about 17 feet in diameter, tapering to about 12 feet at the ends. SRG had originally hoped to make it out of pipe sections bent into ellipses…[but] the architect came up with a more cost-effective and buildable alternative: The webs are
made up of two sets of 5-inch-diameter pipes bent into pure
circles."

The more than 300 bent pipes are inclined in opposite directions to overlap, giving the bridge an elliptical section even though its individual elements have a simpler geometry. Although none of these pedestrian bridges have the same program or scale as the three Portland bridges going through design right now—the Columbia River Crossing, the light rail & pedestrian bridge on the Willamette, or the reconstructed Sellwood Bridge—but they should serve as a reminder of what great design can bring.


If we are willing to select bridge designers with great talent and not just a track record of building other bridges, and if we’re able to craft a public process that not only gets them in place but allows them creativity, this will be the route to bridges we can all be proud of. Sure, the amount of lanes matters. So do budget and sustainable design principles. Even so, the design is what will last for generations even as other factors from the time of construction fade away.






Article by Brian Libby on 03/09/2009
Images obtained from: archiblog.info

Friday, January 23, 2009

Zaha Creates "Diamond Grasshopper"

The competition for the new design for the fire station extension in Antwerp, Belgium to house the port authority headquarters was won by Zaha Hadid who described her conceptual design as a "crystalline volume suspended on concrete legs."

The estimated €30.5m design, which has a facade clad in glass and brushed aluminum panels was designed by Zaha to mimic a diamond in reference to the Belgian port's diamond industry. Hadid said: “The dichotomy between the reflective, faceted form of the new extension and the powerful structural mass of the existing fire station creates a bold and enigmatic statement for the city.”

The design has not been developed much past its conceptual phase, so I am eager to see what the details will contain especially how her structural system is to work. I do hope though that this time it is something feasible; Zaha's designs have not always come to fruition throughout her career. All in all, it is an interesting design though a little over the top for the Belgian port authority.


Image obtained from www.building.co.uk

Friday, August 22, 2008

Zaha's Designs For Singapore

Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) recently unveiled proposed designs for the new Farrer Road residential complex in Singapore composed of seven 36 story residential towers, each rising to a height about 510ft, and 12 villas on an 838,488 sq ft site. The $3 billion project is reminiscent of her dancing tower in Dubai and upon completion, will be the largest residential complex in Singapore's history.
Hadid wished to redefine urban space with this project, as she shows intricate landscaping for the towers' outdoor communal spaces on grade and uses some of the country's unique vegetation as form generators as each tower is subdivided into petal patterns according to the floor plan of each story. The petals are expressed in three dimension giving the overall form the look and feel of petals blossoming (or at least, that was her goal).

I think
Zaha really does give her very best effort to her designs and shows a certain level of commitment that is lacking in many "star architects" but I always find something lacking in some of her work. This project though very revolutionary in form ( I would love to see diagrams depicting the proposed structural bracing for these "petals"), seems to be too much of a site intervention. I know that Farrer Court on Farrer Road is the Bohemian sector of the neighborhood and Zaha wanted to do something lavish for them but this project does not relate to anything around it. I know that I have spoken about this before and just want to say here that when I talk about a building relating to its surroundings, I don't necessarily mean that it has to mimic the buildings around it, but it should at least look like it belongs there and can't be "transplanted" somewhere else and still fit in with the context. Come to think of it, it looks like she used much of her prior designs from her "dancing tower" for this one and it does look like it would be more at home in Dubai than Singapore.

Another thing that made me cringe when I saw this project was not the design per say, which I really do think is quite impressive, but the density of these massings all lumped together. If the communal outdoor gardens are not maintained well with the proper amenities, these buildings could slowly degenerate into slum dwellings. I have seen his trend with many towers in the United States that initially preached "community interaction" in their mission statements but somehow became ghettos where everyone was stacked deep from floor to floor. The Pruitt-Igoe in Missouri is a perfect example.

As I said earlier, I think generally this is a great design and I hope that Zaha will be able to see this project through to its completion and I mean to the last detail to be sure that the gardens look as she intended them.


Images obtained from www.worldarchitecturenews.com
For more info check http://www.tuvie.com/farrer-road-in-singapore-by-zaha-hadid-architects