What Cities Look Like When Architecture Imitates Nature
March 18 2008 / by Venessa Posavec / In association with Future Blogger.net
Category: Culture Year: 2010 Rating: 10
The world may finally be ready for Zaha Hadid. An
Iraq-born deconstructivist architect based in London, Hadid has
been making waves with controversial and futuristic architectural
concepts for over 20 years. Many of her ideas never made it past
the drawing board, because the designs were just too…well,
different. 
Now, she’s gaining steam, and has projects going all over the world. She was recently commissioned to design an Aquatics Centre in London for the 2012 Summer Olympics, a Performing Arts Center in Abu Dhabi, and the spaceship-like Innovation Tower for the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Her buildings are oddly shaped (compared to traditional architecture), but definitely have a very organic feel. For instance, the Abu Dhabi building (pictured above)is complete with windows that look like leaves, and Hadid herself calls it a “biological analogy”.
What we’re really stoked about is her project building the new civil court in Madrid (El Campus de la Justica de Madrid), slated for completion by 2010. The exterior facade of the building is composed of metallic panels in a honeycomb design. They’re equipped with photovoltaic cells that respond to the environment, opening and closing based on conditions. This video offers some sweet eye candy of what the cityscape of Madrid just may look like in the future. This is biomimicry at its best!
Comment Thread (1 Response)
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The new civil court looks cool, although it does remind me of a giant cheese grater.
Posted by: Alvis Brigis March 18, 2008
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