The 11-storey building, with its irregularly aligned floors, sea views and large open roof and terrace spaces, will be completed within 18 months, according to Barcelona’s mayor, Joan Clos.

The Spiralling Tower will add to Barcelona’s ever-increasing stock of buildings by major architects, with a triangular pavilion by fellow Pritzker winners Jacques Herzog and Pierre De Meuron a close neighbour.
The spiral-shaped tower looks like a dynamic stack of books, each representing one floor out of a total of 11 floors or 48 metres.
The floors are offset, permitting a generous sprinkling of terraces, gardens and outdoor spaces.The campus will contain an auditorium, shopping malls, teaching facilities and a series of public spaces on the ground floor.
The building will be almost entirely covered with glass to provide sea views and capture daylight: “I designed the tower to provide the best possible view from every room in the building”, says Zaha Hadid.

Architect Zaha Hadid has designed a tap for British manufacturer Triflow. The touch sensitive controls can deliver filtered or unfiltered hot and cold water via two channels in the faucet neck.

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Mobile Art is a revolutionary event, uniting one of the greatest architects of our time, some of our most innovative artists, and an icon of the fashion world: the quilted bag. Mobile Art is founded in the continuity of Gabrielle Chanel’s strong relationship with the arts, and reaffirms once more our devotion to creativity and to the avant-garde.

Via [Wallpaper]

Zaha Hadid has designed a landmark building for Szervita Square in the historic centre of Budapest, Hungary.

The mixed-use building, for ORCO Property Group, will replace a communist-era car park and will contain shops, restaurants, offices and a nightclub.

“Our goal is to give the inner city an injection of contemporary elegance. A state of the art building with high quality work spaces would strengthen the multifunctional character and urban vitality of Budapest’s city centre. We perceive the need to balance divers’ requirements: Keeping the importance of the cultural heritage in mind the issue is to reconcile the functional, economic and historic preservation needs of the city centre.”

The historic city must maintain its function not only as a cultural centre, retail centre and provider of tourist destinations, but equally as a central business location that provides top value work and business communication spaces.The continued importance as a business hub is dependent upon, the provision of appropriate space for expansion purposes. State of the art spaces should be provided within the city centre to prevent the rush to the outskirts. Such space provision can not easily be achieved in historic buildings.

Link Via [hg.hu]

Zaha Hadid: Performing Arts Centre

The designs presented here in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates and one of the world’s top oil producers, are to be built on an island just off the coast and include three museums designed by the celebrity architects Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and Tadao Ando, as well as a sprawling, spaceshiplike performing arts center designed by Zaha Hadid.

The project also calls for a national museum and a biennial exhibition space composed of 19 pavilions designed by smaller names and snaking along a canal that cuts through the island. Art schools and an art college are also planned.

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

The landscape, the opportunity, the requirement to build something that people all over the world would come to, and the possible resources to accomplish it, opened tracks that were not likely to be considered anywhere else. The site itself, virtually on the water or close to the water on all sides, in a desert landscape with the beautiful sea, and the light quality of the place suggested some of the direction.

Jean Nouvel: Classical Museum

Tadao Ando: Maritime Museum

The whole project, known as the “Cultural District of Saadiyat Island“, would create an exhibition space intended to turn this once-sleepy desert city along the Persian Gulf into an international arts capital and tourist destination.

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Zaha Hadid approached this cube as a huge block to be hollowed out and morphed into a charming sequence of rooms that lead into one another and also open up wide to the outside. Compared to the more open structures of fukasawa’s project, hadid’s ideal house retains the traditional form of the home as a unit and protective shell. The two-story structure has no roof, the walls and furniture appear to grow directly out of a floor that in some cases is totally uneven, and the ceiling is an arched sky.

Some of the furnishings are completely new pieces, and all of them were designed by hadid.

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Experiment and Utopia 1956-2006 is an exhibition opening next month at the Barbican in London. It will include 300 modes, models and animations by the most radical architects of the past 50 years. The exhibition will show how the filmmaker and architects have dreamed the city of tomorrow.

Today, we are used to very futuristic concepts that can be built. In the earlier decade, it was rarely the case. From Archigram to Zaha Hadid via Shigeru Ban and Superstudio, there are all bringing their vision of the future.

Link [Via elastico]