The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Zaha Hadid · a state cultural centre: an auditorium, a museum, temporary exhibition galleries, a multipurpose hall and offices in separate volumes under one continuous envelope · a reinforced concrete structure for the inner volumes and a steel space frame, concealed behind the cladding, carrying the free-form envelope over column-free spans · white panels of glass fibre reinforced concrete and glass fibre reinforced polyester, with glazed curtain walls where the surface opens; the ground of a terraced plaza folding up into wall and roof, curling over the entrance and running on inside as the white floor, walls and ceiling of the lobby; an auditorium lined in timber bands · Baku, Azerbaijan · commissioned 2007, opened May 2012 · Zaha Hadid Architects, the design led by Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, for the Republic of Azerbaijan, named for Heydar Aliyev, president from 1993 to 2003 · as it stands, in use since 2012, scored as the building with the plaza from which its envelope rises
Mode
State cultural centre as civic landscape; one continuous surface made the image of a nation’s new wealth and of its founder
Mythos
The ground lifted: the earth made a mound or a wave that the visitor climbs and enters, the threshold made by the land rising over the door; wave, stroke and carpet evoked, not built
Phase
Commissioned 2007; opened May 2012; the Design Museum’s Design of the Year in 2014, over public objection; Zaha Hadid’s death in 2016; in use for fourteen years
Presentation
Reinforced concrete for the inner volumes and a concealed steel space frame for the envelope; white panels of glass fibre reinforced concrete and polyester; glazed curtain walls where the surface opens; a white lobby without corners; an auditorium lined in timber bands
Register
Buoyant and cool, never terrible; dazzling at noon, soft at dusk, lit from below at night; one key throughout
Scale
One state commission and one founder’s museum; a plaza, a lobby and three cultural rooms under one envelope, set against the Soviet blocks of a capital
Governing Proposition
A state grown rich on oil commissions a cultural centre named for its founding president, and a London office lays over a hall, a museum and galleries a single white surface that rises out of the plaza, curls over the door and runs on inside as floor, wall and ceiling. The wager of the building is that public ground can lift without a break into a public interior, and that one continuous surface, without a straight line or a corner, can be carried across a whole building. The surface held. The rooms it covers are rooms it does not reach.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The building stands in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a city of Soviet blocks and of new wealth from oil. It was commissioned in 2007 by the Republic of Azerbaijan as a cultural centre and named for Heydar Aliyev, president from 1993 to 2003 and father of his successor. It opened in May 2012. The client was a state, the budget was a state’s, and among the rooms of the building is a museum of the life of the man it is named for.
The architects were Zaha Hadid Architects of London, the design led by Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher. The office had built the Vitra fire station and Phaeno in Wolfsburg (2005), and MAXXI in Rome would open in 2010. Its maker’s standing was made, and the commission was less a wager of her career than a chance to carry her line to a scale it had not reached. Hadid died on 31 March 2016, four years after the opening.
The programme is ordinary for a cultural centre: an auditorium or conference hall, a museum, temporary exhibition galleries, a multipurpose hall and offices, each a separate volume. What is not ordinary is what covers them. One continuous white envelope is laid over all of them, rising out of a terraced plaza, and it has no straight line and no corner. Round it the city keeps the frames and slabs of its Soviet public buildings, each with a front. The Center has no front, and it answers them by contrast.
Movement II
The approach is across the plaza, and the plaza is where the building begins. The ground, terraced on the slope above the city, folds up without a joint into the wall, rises in one motion to the crest and falls back. The visitor walks up a public ground that has become a building and cannot say where the one stops and the other starts. For that reason the plaza, where the envelope grows out of it, is scored as part of the building; the rest of the park, and the sculptures placed in it later, are setting.
Over the entrance the surface curls. The roof peels away from the glass and seems to hang without support, and the visitor enters under a lifted edge of the ground. The one archetype the building builds is here: the earth raised into a mound or a wave, climbed and entered, the threshold made by the land rising over the door. It is built into the section, and it belongs to this slope.
Much of the rest is chosen rather than compelled. The curl could be steeper or shallower, the long sweep down to the plaza placed elsewhere, with no loss to any use inside. The steel frame that carries the surface is there to hold the surface, not the rooms. The readings often given for the form, a wave, a calligraphic stroke, a carpet, the Islamic ornament that runs unbroken across floor, wall and vault, are allusions: the plan has no axis, no centre and no ascent toward a room that would make them structure.
Movement III
Inside, the surface goes on. The white of the exterior becomes the floor, the walls and the ceiling of the main lobby, and they run together so that the eye finds no corner to stop on. Circulation is a landscape rather than a corridor, and the visitor stands, for as long as he is there, inside the fold of the ground he walked up. This is the form’s achievement, and the reason a box with a portico could not replace it.
The Center has been in use since 2012 for exhibitions, concerts and state events. The auditorium is lined in timber whose bands continue the flowing lines of the envelope, and the hall is the one room where the surface’s law returns. The bands are handsome. They do not change how a concert or a congress is heard or seen.
The museum and the galleries are good white rooms. They are also ordinary ones: conventional volumes set inside the envelope as boxes inside a shell, with nothing of the surface’s physics. Where the surface opens, the glazed curtain walls are flat and gridded, another language. The building’s law is held strictly at the skin, from the plaza to the hall, and it stops at these doors.
Movement IV
Among the rooms the envelope covers is a museum of the life of Heydar Aliyev. A state of new oil wealth, ruled by one family, gave the cult of its founding president to a weightless white form by a famous foreign architect, and the building shows how far the language of fluid modernity can be put to dynastic use. It shows this to anyone who knows the circumstances. The form does not show it. It softens it.
The museum might have made the house a shrine. It is given neither the building’s centre nor its summit, nor any room the form acknowledges; it is a set of rooms among others under the same white surface. The state and the dynasty are housed in the building and ignored by it. What the form discloses instead is a public matter: that civic ground can rise without a break into a civic interior, and that a citizen can walk from the plaza into the foyer under one surface.
Most of what the building gives is a mood: lightness, optimism, release from the Soviet grid around it. Seen across the plaza at noon the surface dazzles; at dusk it softens; at night it is lit from below against the grey blocks of the city. The mood is rendered with great force, and it is the building’s most constant gift. A mood ranks below a meaning.
Movement V
The surface had to be built. A doubly curved envelope of great extent was rationalised into panels of glass fibre reinforced concrete and glass fibre reinforced polyester, in a country with no such industry, and the joints were set to follow the flow of the form, so that from a distance the seams read as the drawing of the surface. Close up they break the continuity the form claims. Behind the panels a steel space frame carries the envelope over column-free spans and cantilevers the curl, and reinforced concrete holds the rooms. The eye sees none of it: the form is cladding over a frame.
In 2014 the Design Museum in London named the Center its Design of the Year, and the award drew public objection on the grounds of Azerbaijan’s human rights record. The icon and its client have been argued over together since, and much that is written of the building is about its circumstances. Its image travelled far: it became the emblem of Hadid’s late work and of parametric architecture, and white flowing envelopes in China, the Gulf and Central Asia descend from it, rarely carrying its idea. Within a decade the critical tide in architecture had turned from the gesture.
The building is fourteen years old. Its form keeps its governing idea, its use has been continuous, and its white composite skin, in a windy, dusty coastal city, needs constant cleaning and care; fourteen years is no test of such a fabric. Its use is bound to the cult of the man it is named for and lasts at a regime’s pleasure rather than a public’s. The surface already reads as the image of its moment, the boom years of the 2000s. What it holds beyond that moment is the approach: the ground lifting into the wall, and the door under the curl.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, purpose and site, and much yields to the subtractive test. The programme is three ordinary cultural volumes, a hall, a museum and galleries, each a room of conventional shape, and the envelope is laid over them as one surface rather than rising from them. The steel frame exists to hold the surface, not the rooms: the structure is compelled by the image, not the image by the structure. The curl over the entrance and the long sweep to the plaza could be steeper, shallower or placed elsewhere with no loss to any use inside. What resists is the ground folding up into the wall, which makes plaza, approach and building one fact and requires the column-free lobby. The scale is permitted by a state budget, not compelled by the purpose.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Disclosure through space is credited fully, so the question is what the building brings into the open. One thing can be stated and holds: public ground can rise without a break into a public interior, so that a citizen walks from the plaza into the foyer under the same surface, as no flat-fronted cultural building shows. A second disclosure was there to be made and was not: a state of new oil wealth, ruled by one family, gave the cult of its founding president to a weightless white form by a famous foreign architect. The building softens that rather than shows it, and it counts lightly. Most of what the building gives is a mood, lightness and release from the Soviet grid around it, and a mood ranks below a meaning.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Height is high, and frequency high outside, lower within. Elevation comes in the first view across the plaza, the white surface rising from the ground in one motion to the crest and falling back; in the curl over the entrance, where the roof peels away from the glass and seems to hang without support; in the change of the surface through the day, dazzling at noon, soft at dusk, lit from below at night against the grey blocks of the city; and in the lobby, where floor, wall and ceiling run together and the eye finds no corner. The register is buoyant and cool, never terrible. Within, the museum and galleries are good white rooms, and the height is an image held for a long look: it does not deepen with movement through the building.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Myth built, not myth evoked, is the test, and one archetype is built into the section: the ground lifted, the earth made a mound or a wave that the visitor climbs and enters, the threshold made by the land rising over the door. It is load-bearing in the approach and particular to this slope above the city. The rest is evoked. The wave, the calligraphic stroke, the carpet pattern flowing across a surface and the Islamic ornament that runs unbroken over floor, wall and vault are allusions the building does not construct in plan or structure: there is no axis, no centre, no ascent to a summit room. The founder’s museum, which might have made the house a shrine, is a set of rooms the form does not acknowledge.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The inheritance: the Soviet monumental public building that fills Baku, a frame or a slab with a front; the folded, continuous-surface architecture of the 1990s, from the theory around Deleuze’s fold and Greg Lynn’s blobs to Foreign Office Architects’ Yokohama terminal (2002), where the ground becomes the building; and Hadid’s own line from the Vitra fire station through Phaeno in Wolfsburg (2005) and MAXXI in Rome (2010). The departure is to carry the continuous surface across a whole public building at large scale, inside and out, without a straight line or a corner. Against Baku the turn is total; against its own field it completes a path already cleared. The technical stake was real, a surface of this extent built in a country with no such industry; the money was a state’s, and the maker’s standing was already made.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Substitute a conventional cultural building, a box with a portico, and the approach is lost: no plaza that becomes a wall, no passage under a lifted edge of the ground into a lobby that continues it. The lobby is lost with it, a white interior without corners in which circulation is a landscape rather than a corridor, and the sense of standing inside the ground’s own fold. That is the form’s doing, and it changes how arriving and gathering are lived. What holds the axis is that the purposes the building serves are served in rooms the form does not reach. The galleries and the museum would be the same rooms in a box, and the auditorium’s timber bands continue the lines without changing how a concert or a congress is heard or seen.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Evidence over promise, and fourteen years can show little. The building has been studied as the fullest built case of Hadid’s late manner and of the parametric method Schumacher named; its panelling and geometry have been published and taught as a problem of digital design and fabrication; its politics, the commission, the client and the award of 2014, have been argued in the press and in criticism. Much of that is about the building’s circumstances rather than what its form means. The form rewards return in light and weather, and the lobby rewards repeated walking, but its meaning is largely given at first sight: one continuous gesture does not hold the layered spaces, hidden orders or play of parts that keep a building yielding. The figure is forecast more than demonstrated.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The field is public and cultural architecture of the early twenty-first century, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a culmination rather than a reorganisation: the building showed that the continuous surface could be built as a whole public building, ground to roof and exterior to interior, at a scale no earlier work of the line had reached, though Yokohama, Phaeno and MAXXI had already shown the principle. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the emblem of Hadid’s late work and of parametric architecture, reproduced in white flowing envelopes across China, the Gulf and Central Asia that rarely carry its idea, and it set a model of the oil state buying a world-famous cultural icon. It redirected little practice beyond its maker’s office and its imitators, and the critical tide turned from the gesture within a decade.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across fourteen years, a span too short to demonstrate much. The form keeps its governing idea, and nothing in the record shows it altered. The use has been continuous since 2012, in exhibitions, concerts and state events, but it is bound to the state cult of the man the building is named for, and its survival in that use depends on a regime rather than a public. The fabric, white composite panels in a windy, dusty coastal city, demands constant cleaning and care, and fourteen years is no test of a composite cladding. Wide presence earns little, since fame is not proof of permanence, and the surface is charged as fixed to its moment: the white parametric icon of the boom years of the 2000s is already read as period.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is high and the making is load-bearing in the envelope: a doubly curved surface of great extent rationalised into panels, the joints set to follow the flow of the form so that the seams read as drawing rather than as breakage; the steel space frame carrying the surface over column-free spans and cantilevering the curl over the entrance; the white surface passing through the glazing into the interior without a visible change of system. The costs hold it. The structure is concealed behind the image and does nothing the eye can read: the form is cladding over a frame, not structure made visible. Close up, the panel joints break the continuity the form claims, and the rooms the building exists for are conventional in their making.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the plaza where the ground first lifts, and the interior of the auditorium. One law governs both, the continuous surface without corners: it rises from the plaza, folds over the roof, enters through the glass, becomes the lobby’s floor and ceiling, and returns in the timber bands of the hall. Few buildings of its kind hold one law so strictly from outside to inside. Two things hold the figure. The range is narrow, a single gesture, and narrowness is not coherence: the strictness is partly that of having one thing to say. And the law stops at the doors of the museum and galleries, conventional rooms set inside the envelope as boxes in a shell, while the flat, gridded glass where the surface opens speaks another language.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Several orders are present: the ground and the landscape, lifted into the building; the city, the Soviet grid it answers and the capital of oil wealth whose image it is; the state, in a national commission and a dynastic monument with the founder’s museum inside; culture and the arts, in a hall, a museum and galleries; and the civic public, on the plaza and in the lobby. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is how they are held: present more than integrated, the state and the dynasty housed in rooms the form ignores, the city answered by contrast rather than held. Absent are the sacred, labour, the family, the body, individual consciousness and the natural order beyond the slope and the light. A cultural building of one gesture holds fewer orders, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 8.5, then The Made at 8.4, then The Swerve, The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 8.0. An elevation renewed in the first view across the plaza, in the curl over the door, in the surface’s change through the day and in a lobby without corners; a command of the envelope, a doubly curved surface panelled so that its seams read as drawing; a turn total against Baku and real in its technical stake; a form that keeps its idea, in use without a break since 2012; and one law, the surface without corners, held from the plaza to the timber bands of the hall.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: the ground, the city, the state, culture and the civic public are present more than integrated, the state and the dynasty housed in rooms the form ignores, and the sacred, labour, the family and the body are absent. Below the rest, The Inevitable and The Unconcealment at 7.0: an envelope laid over volumes it does not arise from, on a frame that exists for the surface, and a disclosure of public ground rising into a public interior set beside a mood, with what its client is softened rather than shown. Then The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 7.2: one archetype built at the threshold and the rest evoked, and fourteen years of return, much of it given to circumstance. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (8.4), the building of its kind and moment it most resembles, stands above it on every axis, The Sublime by a tenth, and proved what this building follows; the TWA Flight Center (8.0) holds one plastic law from roof to fitting as structure, where this one holds it as cladding over a hidden frame. The facts are two: the surface does not reach the rooms it covers, and what it says it says at first sight.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.0 falls five tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.6, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Swerve at 8.0 and The Imperishable at 8.0 fall five tenths short of the bar of 8.5, Pressure on Tradition at 7.8 seven tenths short, The Archetypal Deep at 7.2 a point and three tenths short and The Unconcealment at 7.0 a point and a half short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.0, The Unconcealment, 7.0, The Archetypal Deep, 7.2, and The Bottomless Well, 7.2, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Two of the five summit conditions are met, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The twelve sum to 91.3, an average of 7.61 that displays 7.6: the work stands where its aggregate places it, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the building as it stands in 2026, of its published plans, sections and photographs and of the critical record; not from a visit, and its acoustics, its maintenance and its daily use are known only thinly. The unit scored is the building: the auditorium, the museum, the exhibition galleries, the multipurpose hall, the offices and the service spaces under one continuous envelope, together with the terraced plaza where the envelope grows out of it, since the ground folds up into wall and roof and the two cannot be separated. The rest of the surrounding park, and the sculptures and installations placed in it later, are setting and are not scored. The exhibitions inside, among them the museum of the life of Heydar Aliyev, are the building’s use and not part of its form. The design is credited to Zaha Hadid Architects, led by Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, for the Republic of Azerbaijan. As far as the record shows the building stands as it was built: nothing is known to have been lost, replaced, relocated or rebuilt, and nothing stands in place of an original part. Nothing is quoted: no statement of the architects is held word for word, and the readings given for the form are paraphrased. The Design of the Year award of 2014 and the objection it drew are facts of reception, weighed only as part of the record that has gathered round the building. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the project architect, the day of the opening, the floor area, the height, the seating of the auditorium, the main contractor, the number of cladding panels, the species of the auditorium’s timber, the earlier use of the site and reports of evictions in the area around it.