Global Cities at the Tate Modern
by Zaha Hadid
London, UK
2007
by Zaha Hadid
London, UK
2007
CONCEPT:
London’s architectural and urban sensibility has to wake up to the fact that London is one of the growth poles in an accelerating world-wide dynamic. We are exploring how to approach such super-large developments with an architect’s sensibility, deploying form- and space-making strategies rather than mere planning tools. The ability to handle large territories architecturally turns on a series of new and powerful digital design techniques. The application of the thus re-tooled architectural sensibility to the design of large scale urban fields results in what we call Parametric Urbanism. The Thames Gateway is hailed as Europe’s largest urban regeneration project. For us it suggests the potential to become the most potent laboratory of contemporary forms of urbanism.
We are starting by the reconstruction the fundamental typological catalogue of architecture and urbanism in terms of field conditions: point-fields of villas, line-fields of towers, plane-fields of slabs and volume fields of urban blocks. With respect to theses 4 basic types of urban fields we go through a series of parametric variations and differentiations before we enter a matrix game of recombination and interpenetration, leading to mutations of both fields and components. Through this process we are building up a repertoire of sufficient richness and complexity to approach the territory with multiple simultaneous strategies. Moments of urban intensity are emerging where the various fields intersect.
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