Middle East Center at St Antony’s College, Oxford - Zaha Hadid |
Monday, 28 January 2008 |
The office of Zaha Hadid, the sometimes controversial and always bold
Baghdad-born, London-based architect, has revealed design plans for a
striking new building in the most traditional and affluent of places,
Oxford.
The new composite-glass structure, to be named the Softbridge Building,
is an extension to the Middle East Center at St Antony’s College. It
will link the 66 and 68 Woodstock Road buildings, one a Victorian mock
Tudor and the other Edwardian.
The new, concave, shiny structure looks like a modern sculpture that
fell from the sky and wedged itself between the two sleepy oldies. The
exuberant and dynamic Softbridge appears to have known that, against
all odds, the old buildings will not buckle, the mature trees will not
die and the limited space into which the newcomer must settle, will be
just enough.
The Softbridge will house a lecture theater and the library, taking
pressure off the old, bursting-at-the-seams facilities. Other goals are
to provide a better research environment for students and to connect
the academic and public functions of the institute. The above-ground
floors house the reception and exhibition areas, the main archive
reading room, library storage and the main library. The lecture theater
and additional storage will be located in the basement.
The outspoken Hadid continues to produce bold design work,
characterized by rounded shapes and unconventional approaches, in spite
of the widely publicized controversies surrounding some of her
buildings in Britain, including the Olympic Aquatic Centre. In an
Oxford Times article, Hadid was quoted as saying, “As a woman, I’m
expected to want everything to be nice and to be nice myself. A very
English thing. I don’t design nice buildings. I don’t like them. I like
architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality.” By Tuija Seipell
|
architecture 
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