Zaha Hadid Architects
Cairo Expo City
Cairo, Egypt
Image courtesy Zaha Hadid Architects
Located between the centre of Cairo and the city’s airport the design for Cairo Expo City delivers a unique facility for Cairo - state of the art city for exhibitions and conferences. The project comprises a major international exhibition and conference centre with business hotel. A further office tower and a shopping centre are also proposed.
"As the exhibition spaces require the greatest degree of flexibility, we wanted to ensure that all the public spaces and formal composition of Cairo Expo City relate to the surrounding Egyptian landscape. Along the great rivers of the region, most particularly the Nile, there is a powerful dynamic - a constant flow between the water and the land - which extends to incorporate the neighboring buildings and landscapes. For the Cairo Expo City design, we worked to capture that seamlessness and fluidity in an urban architectural context."
Zaha Hadid
Image courtesy Zaha Hadid Architects
Carving and sculpting processes have been used to divide the very large exhibition and conference areas required for Cairo Expo City into clusters of individual buildings that have their own formal composition, yet each building relates to the overall design. A main north-south artery is carved through the design, with secondary streams converging at the centre to ease crowd traffic during event. The movement of people within these streams informs the building entrances on the site.
Image courtesy Zaha Hadid Architects
Image courtesy Zaha Hadid Architects
Built area: 450,000 square meters
Height of Towers: 33 and 31 storys
Construction start: 2009
Client: GOIEF, Egypt
Architect: Zaha Hadid Architects
Design: Zaha Hadid & Patrik Schumacher
Project Director: Charles Walker
Project Architects:
Viviana Muscettola
Michele Pasca di Magliano
Senior Architects:
Tariq Khayyat
Kut Nadiadi
Project Team:
Bianca Cheung
Dominiki Dadatsi, Loreto Flores
Hee Seung Lee
Feng Lin,
Ludovico Lombardi
Annarita Papeschi
Effie Kuan
Monica Noguero
Rafael Contraeras
Maria Araya
David Campos
Fernando Poucell.
Engineering: Buro Happold, London
Project Team:
Wolf Mangelsdorf
Christopher Moore
Shady Fayed
Dr. Salmaan Craig
Michael Slessor
Lindsey Malcolm
Stephanie Davis
Quantity Surveyor: Gleeds, London
Traffic and Logistics: Buro Happold, London
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September 28, 2009