Performing Arts Centre, Abu Dhabi (EAU) / Zaha Hadid

Performing Arts Centre proposing to house five theatres – a music hall, concert hall, opera house, drama theatre and a flexible theatre with a combined seating capacity for 6,300. The Centre may also house an Academy of Performing Arts.

Analytical studies of organizational systems and growth in the natural world lead to the set of topologies that are the framework of the Performing Art Centre’s distinct formal language. These natural scenarios are formed by energy being supplied to enclosed systems, and the subsequent decrease in energy caused by development of organized structures.

The ‘energy’ of the Performing Art Centre is symbolized by the predominant movements in the urban fabric along the pedestrian corridor and the Cultural Centre’s seafront promenade – the site’s two intersecting primary elements.

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The Justice Campus of Madrid

With the following article we want to revise the current status of the design definitions of the Justice Campus of Madrid. This huge project will be a great architectonic national and international museum, due to its planning and solutions.

The complex will be composed by 15 buildings, all of them with circular floor plan as the master plan defines. Its distribution is organized as the following graphic indicates:

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Luis Barragan

Foto: (cc) Pov Steve

He was born in 1902 in Guadalajara (Mexico), where he realized his professional studies and graduated as civil engineer and architect in 1925. He never obtained the official degree of architecture, due to the fact that after the graduation he left to Europe and when he returned, the Escuela Libre de Ingeniería didn’t emit degrees of architecture.

While his journey through Europe, he became very influenced with Mediterranean architecture and its gardens, especially with the Alhambra in Granada and with the Italian houses.

He started his professional career in Guadalajara, where he built some houses. These projects where lately published in many magazines in the United States, such as Architectural Record or Houses and Gardens.

After that, he moved to Mexico City, where he passed years doing residential projects, one-family houses and flat buildings mainly.

From 1940 he moved to the real estate businesses. At the same time he bought a square where he developed several gardens for sale and his own house, recognized since 2004 as World Heritage Site by the UNESCO. In this house, Barragán, developed fully his personal ideas, showing characteristics of popular architecture and also architecture from the old convents of Mexico, maintaining at the same time the expression of contemporary architecture.

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