The London Design Museum bestowed upon Zaha Hadid the prestigious Design of the Year award for this incredible Heydar Aliyev Center in Azerbaijan, and there’s nothing green about it. But it does reinterpret fluid Islamic design in some interesting ways, and it really is a work of pure genius.
Zaha Hadid Architecture won an international competition to design the center in 2007. She told Dezeen that it’s her most important design to date.
Located in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, the Heydar Aliyev Center is designed to host the country’s cultural programs and activities while making a concise break from the rigid, formal architectural language prevalent in the Soviet Union.
“The design of the Heydar Aliyev Center establishes a continuous, fluid relationship between its surrounding plaza and the building’s interior,” Hadid’s team write in their design brief for Dezeen.
“The plaza, as the ground surface; accessible to all as part of Baku’s urban fabric, rises to envelop an equally public interior space and define a sequence of event spaces dedicated to the collective celebration of contemporary and traditional Azeri culture.”
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In order to achieve that fluid style which appears to push out of the surrounding urban fabric like a mountain, the design team led by Saffet Kaya Bekiroglu built a steel space frame and clad the exterior in overlapping glass-fiber reinforced concrete panels.
“Fluidity in architecture is not new to this region,” they add.
“In historical Islamic architecture, rows, grids, or sequences of columns flow to infinity like trees in a forest, establishing non-hierarchical space. Continuous calligraphic and ornamental patterns flow from carpets to walls, walls to ceilings, ceilings to domes, establishing seamless relationships and blurring distinctions between architectural elements and the ground they inhabit.”
Daylighting may offset some energy use, but frankly, from an environmental perspective, this building has virtually nothing to offer. From an engineering, design and maybe even especially from a cultural perspective, all accolades are definitely worthy.
Photos via Iwan Baan
Author: Tafline Laylin
As a tour leader who led “eco-friendly” camping trips throughout North America, Tafline soon realized that she was instead leaving behind a trail of gas fumes, plastic bottles and Pringles. In fact, wherever she traveled – whether it was Viet Nam or South Africa or England – it became clear how inefficiently the mandate to re-think our consumer culture is reaching the general public. Born in Iran, raised in South Africa and the United States, she currently splits her time between Africa and the Middle East. Tafline can be reached at tafline (at) greenprophet (dot) com.
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