This building study will not concern itself with the so-called superstar status of its architect. Neither will it adopt inappropriate superlatives that inaccurately place the building at the forefront of state of the art architectural progress: those that allude to performative infrastructures, warp factors, or futuristic forms of lunar urbanism. It will instead focus on the physical reality of one of the world's largest pieces of hand-crafted fair-faced in-situ concrete, and one of Zaha Hadid Architect's (ZHA) most accomplished projects to date, the Phaeno Science Centre: a building that challenges formal convention, compressing construction history by merging ancient and modern techniques as handmade formwork meets advanced computer analysis. Cast from over 27 000 cubic metres of self-compacting concrete, the fact that this building is a technological triumph is not in dispute. It has been discussed at length in an earlier technical review (AR January 2004). In completion, however, merit now lies in its holistic coherence, both as a work in its own right - as a synthesis of materiality, space making and formal manipulation — and as an experiment in place-making; or, as Hadid defines it, mini-urbanism.
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