Construction has commenced on the Zaha Hadid Architects-designed Jinghe New City Culture & Art Center in China, following a ground-breaking ceremony on September 16th, 2022. Zaha Hadid Architects won the international competition to design and deliver the scheme in June, which will serve as a new cultural and arts destination for the burgeoning Jinghe New City tech hub.
As we reported in June following news of ZHA’s commissioning, the new center is organized as a series of “flowing volumes, layers, and surfaces interconnecting with courtyards and landscapes.”
“The Jinghe New City Culture and Art Center will promote the highest standards of construction throughout the city,” said one government official about the scheme. “Creating a variety of new public spaces to serve the community, the project demonstrates Jingue New City’s determination to provide architecture and urbanism of the highest quality.”
New renderings of the center offer a closer look at how such public spaces will materialize, including networks of raised pedestrian walkways that lift visitors above the eight lanes of car traffic that intersect the site.
“With gently sloping ramps providing a gateway to the district’s network of elevated public walkways, the center weaves through the city to link its commercial and residential districts with the parks and river to the south, while also bringing the city’s residents into the heart of the building and providing direct access to the planned metro station,” Zaha Hadid Architects said at the time of the concept’s unveiling.
News of ZHA’s scheme is one of several construction updates recently featured in our editorial. Last week, construction began on an ‘energy-positive’ brick tower in Amsterdam designed by Mecanoo, while work also continued on the Super Nintendo World at University Studios Hollywood.
In September, new images of MAD’s Aranya Cloud Center showed the ‘floating’ scheme taking shape on a coastal site in China, while the firm’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles saw its opening date pushed back to 2025 due to supply chain issues.
2022 has seen Zaha Hadid Architects complete work on one of Zaha Hadid's final designs before her death, with the opening of a high-tech headquarters for BEEAH Group in Sharjah, UAE. The firm is also reported to be designing a metaverse city for Liberland, personally overseen by principal Patrik Schumacher.
6 Comments
I do not know how the building functions and so forth, but the form and shape look beautiful. It would be nice to know if Zaha Hadid designed it or was it designed by her firm after she was gone!
ZHA won the competition in June 2022, which is about 6 years after she passed. So can't imagine she was involved.
I think one of the successful designs Zaha ever created was her practice. It has managed to remain faithful to her style and able to execute on a technical level higher than many of its peers, even after she passed.
it continues to do excellent work, but the style has frozen more or less where she was 8 years ago. which is a shame because she was very consistent at pushing things forward and reinventing the way she imagined space and materials.
It’s a situation similar to Apple after Jobs death. But pretty amazing that it’s able to continue none the less.
Good eye catching design. Hope this will function well.
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