Architecture critic Edwin Heathcote explores Zaha Hadid’s groundbreaking Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Germany. Designed as an "urban knuckle" to stitch together an industrial powerhouse and a residential city divided by railway tracks and a canal, the Phaeno completely reimagined public space and structural engineering.
Lifting 12,000 square meters of concrete above the ground on ten massive, hollow conical feet, Hadid transformed the earth below into an open public gateway and the interior into a continuous, 9,000-square-meter architectural adventure playground. Heathcote examines how this monumental work vindicated Hadid’s visionary ideas, turning what critics once dismissed as "unbuildable paper architecture" into a fluid, living reality.
Time Period:
21st century
Edwin Heathcote is the architecture and design critic of The Financial Times. He is an architect and designer and the author of over a dozen books including The Meaning of Home (2012). He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of online design writing archive Readingdesign.org and a columnist and contributor to a number of magazines, including GQ and Icon.