Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Fully integrated to enhance and use the synergetic possibilities of the different functions, an arch of 228 apartments will create a large hall which houses 100 market stalls, shops and restaurants, 1,200 parking spaces and an underground super market.

The apartments will all have a balcony on the outside and a window to the inside of the market. Insulation will prevent any unwanted effects.

The 40 meter tall and wide opening of the front and back will be covered with a flexible suspended glass facade, allowing for maximum transparency and a minimum of structure. The interior of the arch will display market produce.

from :www.arcspace.com

Read More

The Architect's Studio

Visitors navigate working materials, original sketchbooks, and works in-progress to experience the span of Calatrava's career. Videos create the sense of moving in and through his built works and across bridges.

The Architect's Studio also explores Calatrava's dynamic process in the milieu of the architect's studio, including the way its floor is strewn with sketches of figures in motion and charging bulls.

The exhibition is organized for the Henry Art Gallery by independent curator Kirsten Kiser (Editor-in-Chief of arcspace) with Curatorial Coordinator, Jordan Howland.

The Santiago Calatrava: The Architect's Studio exhibition catalog is presented as a sketchbook, of more than 50 color sketches, with an enclosed CD-Rom that documents 30 projects, including sculptures and furniture, with color photos, complete texts, and five QuickTime videos.

The many projects presented range from Calatrava's early 1980s buildings, the Stadelhofen Station in Zürich, Ernstings Warehouse in Coesfeld-Lette and the Lyon - Satolas TGV Station in Lyon, to the latest projects, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Tenerife Concert Hall, the Athens 2004 Olympic Sports Complex, City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, the new Path Terminal at the World Trade Center in New York, "Turning Torso" in Malmø, the tallest apartment building in Europe, and several extraordinary bridges including the latest design for the Light Rail Train Bridge in Jerusalem.

Read More

Dalian International Conference Center

January 04. 2016 .Dalian China

A multi-functional "small city within a city" with conference and event rooms for 7,000 visitors. A landmark for the prospering harbor city of Dalian.

The World Economic Forum, the main user, mainly known for its annual meetings in  Davos,

Switzerland annually organizes a "summer  Davos" at this new site in China. The requirements for this function determined the spatial concept, the size and number of conference rooms and offices.

To make the building's architectural concept and function visible from the outside, the conference halls penetrate the facade. They stand out against the metallic outer skin and deform it. 

The perforated aluminum slats of the exterior shell provide a sufficient amount of daylight and give the building its striking sculptural shape. The slats are opened in some of the public areas, offering

selective views of the city and the bay of Dalian. 

The two major urban axes converging give rise to the building's position and basic shape. The Conference Hall and Opera House are located in the center of the building beneath the shell-shaped, partially translucent roof.   

Small conference rooms surround this core like pearls, forming an internal urban structure with squares and streets that invite visitors to linger and chat - informal meeting spaces that are so important for conferences. The controlled supply of daylight assists the visitors in their spatial orientation and creates a atmospheric variety on the inside. 

Since the opera and conference center lie directly behind one another, the main stage can be used for the classic theater auditorium just as well as for the flexible multi-purpose hall. The opera house is based on a multifunctional design and can be used for  events  such  as conferences, music and theater all the way to classic opera with very little effort. 

Despite its enormous size for 7,000 people, the building is as vibrant as a city. The entry hall has the

size of four football fields and reaches up to 45 meters high.

The building consists of two elements, the table and the roof. The opera, conference halls and access zones rest on the table-shaped steel construction, with a three-dimensional deformed facade-roof construction above it. Both elements are steel space frames with depths ranging between five and eight meters.  The whole structure is supported by fourteen vertical cores made of composite steel and concrete. The steel constructions were produced at Chinese shipyards, since these were the only facilities where the 10-cm steel plates could be welded safely and precisely. Modern technology and construction expertise allowed for span widths of more than 85 meters and projections of more than 40 meters.

Dalian's  location on the sea, along with the strong wind were essential environmental natural resources to minimize energy consumption.

The relative thermal energy of the  sea water and the natural ventilation of the enormous air volumes

in the building are used for the cooling in the summer and heating in the winter. The atrium beneath the roof is conceived as a solar-heated, naturally ventilated sub climatic area. A high degree of natural daylight reduces the energy consumption for artificial lighting and has a positive psychological effect. Integrated into the shape of the building, solar panels provide additional energy.

Read More

The Broad

Diller Scofidio + Renfro

August 31. 2015.

Los Angeles, California, USA

Dubbed "the veil and the vault," the museum's design merges the two key programs of the building: public

exhibition space and the storage that will support the Broad Art Foundation's extensive lending activities. 

Rather than relegate the storage to secondary status, "the vault" plays a key role in shaping the museum experience from entry to exit. Its heavy opaque mass is always in view, hovering midway in the building. Its carved underside shapes the lobby below and public circulation routes. Its top surface is the floor of the third  floor galleries.     

The vault is enveloped by "the veil" -  a porous, honeycomb-like, exterior structure that spans across the block-long building and provides filtered natural daylight. The museum's "veil" lifts at the corners, welcoming visitors  and activating the lobby.   

The public is then drawn upwards via an  escalator that tunnels through the vault and arrives onto nearly an

acre of column-free gallery space that is bathed in diffused light. The gallery has 23 foot- high ceilings, and the roof is supported by 7 foot-deep steel girders. Art installations on the third floor gallery include works by Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Sherrie Levine.

Departure from the third floor gallery space is a return trip through the vault via a winding central stair that

offers glimpses into the vast holdings of the collection.  The Broad Art Foundation operates as a "lending library" with works from the nearly 2,000-piece Broad collection made available to museums around the    world.

The Broad also includes the Oculus Hall, a multipurpose public space on the  second floor, with flexible seating capacity of up to 200. It will be used for lectures, films, performances and other public programs. It is named for its location within the oculus on the Grand Avenue facade of the building. 

Public amenities associated with The Broad include an adjacent public plaza, a new restaurant, a new mid-block traffic signal and crosswalk connecting The Broad and public plaza with MOCA and the Colburn School, and additional streetscape improvements. The plaza's bosque of 100-year-old Barouni olive trees and grass create public space for picnics, outdoor films, performances and educational events. 

The veil is made primarily of 2,500 fiberglass reinforced concrete (GFRC) panels and 650 tons of steel. Supported at three points the Grand Avenue touchdown beam can rock about a central pivot point allowing the entire veil structure to slightly "see-saw" back and forth along its plane during a major earthquake. Each end of the beam is allowed to move up and down by 3/4 of an inch. 

Read More

Opus Hong Kong

Gehry Partners.LLP.
April 23, 2012 .Hong Kong, China
Located at 53 Stubbs Road on The Peak, a spectacular site that has been in the Swire Group for more than
The massing of the tower spirals gently upward, anchored against the steep slope of the PeakThe building has been designed to enhance and reflect Hong Kong's distinctive landscape, and is custom-made for the city it overlooks.
/Frank Gehry
The design takes advantage of the panoramic views by providing a continuous floor-to-ceiling curved glass facade enclosing the main living spaces.
Each floor of the tower is dedicated to a single apartment with a terrace and private elevator lobby as foyer.
This site has a special place in Swire Group's history, and we knew that Frank Gehry, with his unorthodox and inventive design concepts, could help us create an outstanding new landmark for the city. Opus Hong Kong is truly an exceptional architectural achievement, and we feel privileged to have been a part of the process.

The roof of the tower offers two communal pools and one private pool for the penthouse. Other amenities

include a gym, ground level gardens and a full level of underground parking.

by a stack of stone clad blocks, that are reminiscent of rough cut blocks in a stone quarry. These blocks are punctuated by boat deck balconies that project from the facade.

60 years, Opus Hong Kong is a sculptural 12-story building comprised of two double-level garden Quarry blocks retain the slope behind the tower acting as planters for lush landscape that blends seamlessly into the

natural vegetation of the hillside.

apartments and 10 apartments, each unique in design and occupying an entire floor of the building.

Read More

Parrish Art Museum

December 10. 2012

Water Mill, New York, USA

Parrish Art Museum references the vernacular architecture of the East End, to emphasize the

relationship of art to nature, and to be flexible and welcoming.

The placement of the building is a direct result of the skylights facing towards the north. This east-west orientation, and its incidental diagonal relationship within the site, generates dramatically changing perspective views of the building and further emphasizes the building's extreme yet simple proportions. It lays in an extensive meadow of indigenous grasses that refers to the natural landscape of Long Island.

Our design for the Parrish Art Museum is a reinterpretation of a very genuine Herzog & de Meuron typology, the traditional house form. What we like about this typology is that it is open for

many different functions, places and cultures. Each time this simple, almost banal form has become something very specific, precise and also fresh.

An ordered sequence of post, beam and truss defines the unifying backbone of the building. Its materialization is a direct expression of readily accessible building materials and local construction methods.


The exterior walls of in situ concrete act as long bookends to the overall building form, while the grand scale of these elemental walls is tempered with a continuous bench formed at its base for sitting and viewing the surrounding landscape.

Large overhangs running the full length of the building provide shelter for outdoor porches and terraces.

A cluster of ten galleries defines the heart of the museum. The size and proportion of these galleries can be easily adapted by re-arranging partition walls within the given structural grid.

We set the basic parameters for a single gallery space by distilling the studio's proportions and adopting its simple house section with north-facing skylights. Two of these model galleries form wings around a central circulation spine that is then bracketed by two porches to form the basis of a straightforward building extrusion. The floor plan of this extrusion is a direct translation of the ideal functional layout.

The back of house functions of administration, storage, workshops and loading dock are located to the east of the gallery core. The public program areas of the lobby, shop, and café are located to the west of the galleries, with a flexible multi-purpose and educational space at the far western end.

The landscape, an important aspect of the Museum experience, consists entirely of native plants. The design evokes the iconic features of the East End - meadow, wetland, scrub woodland, and long views of expansive sky and horizon.

Read More

Zaha Hadid retrospective at the State Hermitage

September 17. 2015

Zaha Hadid

Art students, architects and photographers have been storming Saint Petersburg's Winter Palace to view Zaha Hadid's summer-long exhibition, a tribute to an art revolution launched in the imperial

capital of the czars a century ago.

Converging on the palace complex from across Russia, the visitors have been shooting images of Ms. Hadid's paintings, sculptures and architectural models - all part of the artist/architect's first retrospective in Saint Petersburg, says Ksenia Malich, who is curating the show at the State Hermitage Museum.

The 250 year-old palace now holds an edgy ensemble of galleries for Ms. Hadid's artworks; stop-motion paintings that capture skyscrapers or cities speeding across the skies; and her architecture - buildings that seem to hover above the Earth, held aloft on beams of light.

"I won the Pritzker Prize in Saint Petersburg," Zaha Hadid says in an interview, "so to do the new show there is extraordinary."

On receiving The Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest award, in a ceremony staged at the Hermitage, Ms. Hadid said that Saint Petersburg's Suprematist art movement had launched a new age of creativity for artists and architects around the world.

After tens of thousands of years of artistic progression, spanning the early modern humans who painted their own hands onto cave ceilings to the early Modern artists who speed-sketched impressions of cafes, cathedrals or starlit skies, the Suprematists were the first to create imaginary abstract worlds on canvas.

Revolutionizing the world of art by abruptly abandoning the depiction of reality in painting, these pioneers of abstraction "opened the possibility of unfettered invention," Ms. Hadid added.

Although the Suprematists flourished during the early euphoria of the October Revolution in 1917, they faced escalating attacks as Stalin moved to impose his diktats on Socialist Realist art and authoritarian architecture across the Soviet Union.

"The Russian avant-garde explained to artists they can be free - there are no restrictions on

creativity," says Mikhail Piotrovsky, the liberal scholar who heads the Hermitage.

Artists and architects under attack

Yet Ms. Hadid has helped give new life to the Suprematist movement on the global stage and extend it to the sphere of architecture, Mr. Piotrovsky adds in an interview.

It was while an architecture student in London, Ms. Hadid recalls, that she became entranced by Suprematist paintings with simple geometric shapes such as rectangles, circles and crosses - that drift dreamlike across the canvases. 

A new age in architecture

Across these painted worlds, she says, she perceived an otherworldly anti-gravity and the portents for a new age in architecture.  In an epiphany, she adds, she saw the potential for a structure or even an entire cosmopolis to break free from the force of gravitation.  She began painting her visions of floating cities, in artworks like The Peak series, now on view at the Hermitage exhibition, and her quest to transform these drawings into architectural projects that appear to defy Newton's law of universal gravitation. 

Through sophisticated engineering and design, Ms. Hadid explains, "a building can appear to be floating, free from gravity."

Patrik Schumacher, director of Zaha Hadid Architects, says the Suprematist revolution unleashed a utopian creative explosion that continues to reverberate through the spheres of art and architecture even today, and that the studio aims to harness these forces in its own designs.

While the leaders of Russia's avant-garde and their calls for cultural freedom were crushed across the Soviet Union, Zaha Hadid has helped engineer a renaissance of their art and ideals across the West.  In the center of Zurich, she paid homage to these fallen art revolutionaries by designing a show at theGmurzynska Gallery that juxtaposed Suprematist works by Kazimir Malevich, the founder of the movement, with Hadid's own sculptures and prints.  

Kazimir Malevich, the founder of the movement, with Hadid's own sculptures and prints.  

Ms. Hadid transformed the Swiss gallery into a supersize Suprematist artwork that explorers could trek through, says the Gmurzynska Gallery's director, Mathias Rastorfer.

A timeless glow in Zaha Hadid's designs

"There is a timelessness to the Suprematist artworks," says Mr. Rastorfer, which likewise shines through Zaha Hadid's paintings and architecture.

The London-based architect similarly transmuted the Guggenheim Museum in New York when she designed The Great Utopia exhibition on Russia's avant-garde, says Thomas Krens, director emeritus of the Guggenheim Foundation.

Mr. Krens, who later filled the Guggenheim Museum with Hadid's own canvases and maquettes for a massive retrospective, says she is part of the pantheon of utopian architects, alongside Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, whose structures have the rare ability to completely transfigure their surroundings.

As head of the Guggenheim Foundation, Krens commissioned Frank Gehry to design the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao; the groundbreaking sculpture-like titanium structure triggered a spiraling metamorphosis of the entire Basque city in a phenomenon now called "the Bilbao Effect."  Zaha Hadid's cultural projects have sparked a similar sweeping "transformative effect" on the wider cosmopolis, the Guggenheim's erudite director adds in an interview.

Suprematist utopia realized

Zaha Hadid says the Suprematists were just one of the groups of utopian artists or architects who set out to create a new world but faced opposition from an authoritarian government.

Yet through struggle, she adds, "the utopia is eventually realized."

The paintings and architectural designs she has unveiled at the Winter Palace, she says, "are infused with the Suprematist idea of creative freedom." In that sense, she adds, the reemergence of the Suprematist spirit in Saint Petersburg "is really amazing."

Hans Ulrich Obrist, a co-director at the Serpentine Galleries in London who commissioned Ms. Hadid to design the expansion of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, says the Pritzker Prize laureate "has contributed to the revival of the Russian avant-garde through her extraordinary drawings, through her architecture and through her exhibitions."

"It's wonderful that Zaha's work is now coming to the country whose artists inspired her breakthroughs," he says. "By returning to Saint Petersburg, the Suprematist revolution is really coming full circle."

Read More