In the spring, Qatar opened Al-Janoub Stadium, the first of the arenas built especially for the 2022 World Cup. The stadium will host the games of the group stage and the quarterfinals. In May of this year, it already hosted the first match – the final of the Qatar Emir’s Cup, in which Al-Duhail defeated Al-Sadd’s team Hawi.
The author of the stadium is the famous architect Zaha Hadid (together with the engineering giant AECOM). The project was designed in 2013 and was one of her last: she died of a heart attack three years later. “Al-Janub”, like almost everything in her career, turned out to be complex, large-scale and very expensive. It cost Qatar $575 million. Its capacity is up to 40,000 fans.
Al-Janouba has made a sliding roof to protect players and fans from the sun. The design refers to Arabian seafaring.
The stadium stands on a broad podium in the city of Wakra, 20 kilometers from the Qatari capital Doha. For soccer the climate here is not the most comfortable: In summer, the air can get as hot as 50 degrees Celsius. For this reason, the World Cup was moved from summer to November to December, and protection from the sun was one of the key tasks in the design. The solution was a sliding roof created by Zaha Hadid Architects (hereafter ZHA) together with the engineering company Schlaich Bergermann Partner. The polymer-clad pylons cover the entire soccer pitch and the bleachers.
In winter and spring, the Qatar is often hit by sandstorms. To check the stadium’s readiness, it was tested in a hot air tube using an exact 3D model. As a result, it has a smooth aerodynamic shape that withstands the wind load well and at the same time refers to the national peculiarities of the region. Wakra is located on the shores of the Persian Gulf and its history is closely linked to pearl harvesting and fishing. This is why Zaha was largely inspired by the hull of a dhow, a traditional Arab ship with a triangular hull.
The references do not end there: in pleated wall and roof sections one can see folds of barchans and elegant Arabic ligature, and in the snow-white covering – a reminder of sea shells dried in the sun. The bronze ornament on the facade glazing looks like a mashrabiya, a traditional Arab grating for protection from the sun.
All these images, however, are not too obtrusive. The studio deliberately brought out a more abstract form so that it generates its own associations for everyone. And mostly, of course, the stadium looks like a very expensive set for “Star Wars” or “Arrival.”
Hadid spent two-thirds of her life working on the desk. She began to receive orders only when she was awarded the most prestigious architectural prize in the world.
This, by the way, was Zaha’s strength – her ability to make architecture outside of time, place, culture, and even as if outside of the laws of gravity. As architect Sean Griffiths said about one of her buildings, the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center in Baku: “In fact, it is an empty vessel that can be filled with any ideology. It would have looked good in Moscow in 1923…”.
At first, Hadid’s architecture was inherently revolutionary – it is not without reason that some of its main inspirers were Russian avant-garde artists. Especially Kasimir Malevich, to whom she dedicated her diploma project at the AA School of Architecture.
Largely because of her excessive courage, Hadid spent two-thirds of her life working in a desk. In the early 90s she designed a fire station on the campus of the Vitra furniture company, then three times won the competition for the opera house in Cardiff, but its construction was abandoned. Then there were several other spectacular, but not too conspicuous buildings. But they were appreciated by critics and colleagues. In 2004, Zaha, who was not particularly well known to anyone, won the Pritzker Prize (something like an Oscar in architecture).
Since then, orders have poured in from all over the world. The language of her works turned out to be so universal that Hadid was in demand in Rome, Singapore, Beirut and even in Moscow, where the Dominion Tower business center and the Capital Hill villa in Barvikha were built based on her project.
The basis of her projects was parametricism, a term invented in 2008 by Patrick Schumacher, Hadid’s colleague and associate. To explain very crudely, parametric architecture is created with the help of computer algorithms and big data analysis, which cannot be processed by traditional methods. This allows you to give buildings the most complex shape – such as the Transport Museum in Glasgow (in 2013 recognized as the best in Europe), or the Aquatics Center in London – smooth, spreading two “wings” like a giant slope.