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Posted on: December 21, 2017

BEYOND BUILDINGS

Zaha Hadid Controls the Curve

A shopping mall and office complex in Beijing shows that you can build blobs beautifully.

By AARON BETSKY

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Zaha Hadid Architects' Galaxy Soho in Beijing.

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I went to a shopping mall. That should not be such an unusual statement this holiday season, except for a few
things: I have not actually shopped in a traditional mall for years, the mall was in Beijing, and it was designed by
Zaha Hadid. I went there to see the building, Galaxy Soho, rather than to purchase last-minute gi s. And, like a
good present, the Galaxy is a goodie wrapped in a particularly slick way.

The Galaxy is actually more than just a shopping mall. It has more than 3.5 million square feet of office space,
restaurants and event venues, and shopping spread out over four towers, each 14 stories tall, that ooze
together at their bases. It sits along Beijing’s Second Ring, where it joins an almost continual line of such In Situ > Aidlin Darling
developments that are replacing what remains of the city’s traditional neighborhoods.
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The mall at the Galaxy Soho

That last matter caused some controversy when the building opened in 2012 and received an award from the
Royal Institute of British Architects. Critics excoriated the positive press attention both for not mentioning what

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was destroyed to make room for the development and for not showing the alien nature of the buildings when
you see them from the narrow streets with their low shops and dwellings that still stretch out behind them.
Hadid’s office responded that the site had been cleared even before they received the commission and that the
buildings were designed to be a response to the other high-rise and mid-rise developments along the Ring,
assuming that the neighborhood was doomed to change anyhow.

Certainly, the Galaxy stands very much by itself. While the structures rise out of a shared base on the access
road that parallels the Second Ring, so that they appear to pile up out of a continuation of that high-speed Schaum/Shieh >
automotive geology, their rear faces a park that separates the structures from its neighbors, which now include
a few bland hotels and office structures. The main shopping street that connects all of the buildings is located
below grade and sends a stream of stores up the interior atria of the towers and toward the restaurants at the
top. This is not a contextual building.

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There are some unfortunate mashups of stone and metal at the the
Guangzhou Opera House.

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What the Galaxy is, however, is scrumptious. Hadid’s office spent years developing ways of turning their
computer-assisted images into structures. Along the way, they produced quite a few clunkers that looked
much better onscreen than in reality (the Guangzhou Opera House comes to mind, with its pipes jutting in and
out of curves and its stone and metal meeting in awkward mashups). With the Galaxy, the late Dame Zaha,
current studio head Patrik Schumacher, and their gang showed that, with enough money and a good client,
they could actually build those whiplash curves and sinuous tiers.

Iwan Baan

As you move through the Galaxy, everything flows, curves, slides, and piles up in a manner that leads both your
body and your eye on through the complex. The public and semi-public spaces are particularly successful, as
their fluidity draws you in and around, while never overwhelming or intimidating you. Details, from coved
ceilings and soffits to benches the designers have strewn around so that they resemble small pebbles calved
by the undulating mountains around them, resolve the complex geometries and turn them into functional
elements.

Grand opening of Galaxy SOHO in Beijing - Zaha Hadid --- [HD]

The overall shapes slide away from definition as well. As you drive and then walk around the Galaxy Soho, you
are never quite sure what the shapes are, as the individual elements keep morphing away from a singular form
or definition. Hadid claimed that they were based on a viewing of ancient landscape paintings, but they are
better at capturing the seductive computer renderings that the “blobist” style has promised us for so long, but
has, until now, largely failed to deliver. In the world of “parametricism” (Schumacher’s name for what the firm
does), the algorithms on which the designs are based as well as the computer’s ability to drink in data and

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produce integrated responses, both in a technical and an aesthetic sense, are meant to produce a style of
building that affords different uses and views in an integrated manner. The Galaxy does that better than any
building I have seen.

Part of the success comes from a visual suppression of function. The stores’ advertising folds under the eaves
and behind the glass storefronts, the office floors pile up in a manner that recedes from the eye, and the whole
complex breaks down into various connected parts so that you are never fully aware of the presence of those
millions of square feet.

Iwan Baan

Night view of the towers

Thoroughly entranced by this fully resolved building, I walked through the shopping areas and gazed up at the
towers, joining crowds who, even on a crisp winter day, seemed to be enjoying the public spaces. Then I
hopped in a taxi (without buying anything) and resigned myself to the perpetual traffic jam that is Beijing. As I
was sitting there, I looked down from a last peek at the Galaxy Soho to the bumper of the Mercedes-Benz
sedan idling next to us, and noticed the way that its hood gathered into layers of curves dipping down below its
front grille. There was Hadid’s architecture in automotive miniature. The car was as slick, resolved, and
expensive as the building. This is the world to which computer-assisted architecture has finally gained entry,
that of a global flow of goods, ideas, people, and capital, oozing around the generic metropolis to provide
moments of high-performance high style.

Aaron Betsky is a regularly featured columnist whose stories appear on this website each week. His views and
conclusions are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine nor of the American Institute of Architects.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aaron Betsky
Aaron Betsky is president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin and a critic and author of more than a dozen books on
art, architecture, and design. Trained at Yale, Betsky has worked as a designer for Frank O. Gehry & Associates and
Hodgetts + Fung, taught at SCI-Arc, and served as the director of the 11th Venice International Architecture Biennale.

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