"On the banks of the Pearl River in Guangzhou, Zaha Hadid's long-awaited Opera House cuts a striking silhouette in the former docks of this buzzing Chinese City."
Is Zaha Hadid the Libeskind semi-soft?
"On the banks of the Pearl River in Guangzhou, Zaha Hadid's long-awaited Opera House cuts a striking silhouette in the former docks of this buzzing Chinese City."
Is Zaha Hadid the Libeskind semi-soft? Domus
8 Comments
FOR me what's interesting about the amorphous shape is not the form of the container but the implied possibilities of malleable form or an unfixed shape. It's as if saying " this place can be anything, contain anything, is designed not to be fixed, expresses some un-agreed upon use. A shape where everything is literately smoothed over. A shape that says 'we will get to it later'.
Later never arrived, and eventually entropy took over the container. This is the shape of entropy.
eric chavkin
"the shape of entropy," i like that, it is very telling and could be said of a lot of recent architecture. It seems that a lot of competition-winnign projects are going straight from the winning renderings to construction, without the necessary re-visting of the initial questions and necessary close consideration of the problem.
lately i find it difficult to look at any of these amazing new buildings without wondering if the city it sits in stands empty. something like 62 million empty (but new !) units all over the country and all of the citizens rally just want to move to shanghai.
isn't a phrase like "the shape of entropy" an example of the same vapid content that you want to put down?
above discussion thread has quite a collection of photos, construction and finished, including some that are pretty revealing about the exterior cladding. the triangulated faceting is pretty rough in spots -- esp the corners where they tried just curving the facets instead of keeping them planar and making them smaller as the curvature increases for example, and the seams between surfaces where the faceting doesn't line up and/or gets wonky... another example of an industrial design aesthetic blown up to architectural scale that gets clumsy in the execution. but in fairness, if the result of VE, it could have been much more brutal.
for a dominantly formal composition, the elements seem under-integrated / interrelated, esp in the atrium, e.g. structural diamond grid of the different facade faces to each other, and the compositional relation of these grids to the interior, as least as far as I can tell from the pics. and why run paneling through a half bay of the facade grid (domus atrium pic)?
love the mechanical ducting run along the facade grid (page 3, 1/3rd down)
theater interior... what would be the word... neo-gaudy? (esp page 4)
amorphous or not, zaha's brand was always about (a version of) an elegantly formal/composed cohesive aesthetic whole (which could be argued to be the antithesis of entropy), as opposed to say OMA's near indifference to the issue (and which I think often comes much closer to built entropy). this one seems pretty mixed results in concept and execution.
is there any need to compare Zaha Hadid with Libeskind, really?...
sure. a gateway question if you will.
Entropy… LOL. Quite optimistic! Sounds like a professor in second year of undergrad. When did ambiguous, undefined spaces ever have success? When did the public ever occupy them? How does this building serve the public? Same as the concert hall in LA..
Perhaps the MACBA in Barcelona is an exception, which is occupied almost 24h a day. The difference being, the Catalans have a very defined street culture.
I imagine this Opera house will close its gates by 9PM at the latest and security guards will kick every body out. But I guess this project, like so many others, does serve for good intellectual masturbation for architect elitists.
From a formal standpoint, I'm really bothered by the lack of cohesiveness in the project. Every image from the Doums article looks like it could have come from a completely different project. I find the lobby to be especially problematic - the interior spaces and the skin seemed to be designed by 2 different designers that had no idea what the other was doing, like some deranged architectural version of telephone.
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