The flamboyant Zaha Hadid has again won another project that boasts formal excesses that characterize some of her projects. An architecture that has its best customers in the oil countries.

The ArRiyadh Development Authority has announced that Zaha Hadid Architects will build the new King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) Metro Station in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. With over 5 million residents, Riyadh’s population has more than doubled since 1990. To serve its fast-growing population, the city will build a new public transport system.
 

The King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) Metro Station will serve as a key interchange on the new Riyadh Metro network for Line 1, as well as the terminus of Line 4 (for passengers to the airport) and Line 6. The local monorail can also be accessed from the station via a skybridge. With six platforms over four public floors and two levels of underground car parking, the KAFD Metro Station will be integrated within the urban context of the financial district, responding to the functional requirements of a multimodal transport centre and the district’s future vision. The project extends beyond the simple station typology to emphasize the building’s importance as a dynamic, multi-functional public space; not only an intermediate place perceived through quick transitions, but also a dramatic public space for the city.

The design places the station at the centre of a network of pathways, skybridges and metro lines envisaged by the KAFD master plan. Connectivity diagrams and traffic across the site have been mapped and structured to clearly delineate the pedestrian routes within the building, optimize internal circulation and avoid congestion. The resulting configuration is a three- dimensional lattice defined by a sequence of opposing sine-waves (generated from the repetition and frequency variation of station’s daily traffic flows) which act as the spine for the building’s circulation. These sine-waves are extended to the station’s envelope and strictly affiliated to its internal layout, translating the architectural concept to the exterior.

Zaha Hadid Architects

CREDITS

Design.- Zaha Hadid Architects
Project Director.- Gianluca Racana, Filippo Innocenti. Project Architect.- Fulvio Wirz, Gian Luca Barone. Design Team.- Alexandre Kuroda, Fei Wang, Lisa Kinnerud, Jorge Mendez-Caceres. Structural Engineer.- Buro Happold. Services.- Buro Happold. Transport and Civil Engineering.- Buro Happold. Fire Engineering.- Buro Happold. Façade Consultant.- NewTecnic. Cost Consultant.- Davis Langdon.

Client.- ArRiyadh Development Authority
Size.- 20,434
Levels.- 4 above ground. 2 below ground (car parking)
Metro Lines served.- Line 1, Line 4, Line 6.
Skybridge access to monorail (6 train plattforms)

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Zaha Hadid, (Bagdad, 31 October 1950 – Miami, 31 March 2016) founder of Zaha Hadid Architects, was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize (considered to be the Nobel Prize of architecture) in 2004 and is internationally known for both her theoretical and academic work.

Each of her dynamic and innovative projects builds on over thirty years of revolutionary exploration and research in the interrelated fields of urbanism, architecture and design. Hadid’s interest lies in the rigorous interface between architecture, landscape and geology as her practice integrates natural topography and human-made systems, leading to experimentation with cutting-edge technologies. Such a process often results in unexpected and dynamic architectural forms.

Education: Hadid studied architecture at the Architectural Association from 1972 and was awarded the Diploma Prize in 1977.

Teaching: She became a partner of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, taught at the AA with OMA collaborators Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, and later led her own studio at the AA until 1987. Since then she has held the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; the Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois, School of Architecture, Chicago; guest professorships at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg; the Knolton School of Architecture, Ohio and the Masters Studio at Columbia University, New York. In addition, she was made Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Fellow of the American Institute of Architecture and Commander of the British Empire, 2002. She is currently Professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria and was the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

Awards: Zaha Hadid’s work of the past 30 years was the subject of critically-acclaimed retrospective exhibitions at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2006, London’s Design Museum in 2007 and the Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, Italy in 2009. Her recently completed projects include the MAXXI Museum in Rome; which won the Stirling award in 2010. Hadid’s outstanding contribution to the architectural profession continues to be acknowledged by the most world’s most respected institutions. She received the prestigious ‘Praemium Imperiale’ from the Japan Art Association in 2009, and in 2010, the Stirling Prize – one of architecture’s highest accolades – from the Royal Institute of British Architects. Other recent awards include UNESCO naming Hadid as an ‘Artist for Peace’ at a ceremony in their Paris headquarters last year. Also in 2010, the Republic of France named Hadid as ‘Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres’ in recognition of her services to architecture, and TIME magazine included her in their 2010 list of the ‘100 Most Influential People in the World’. This year’s ‘Time 100’ is divided into four categories: Leaders, Thinkers, Artists and Heroes – with Hadid ranking top of the Thinkers category.

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