Zaha Hadid: Car Park and Terminus

The blurry interface of suburbia and exurbia (a residential area outside of a city and beyond suburbia) represents a strange and alien territory for architects, a land of vague contexts and haphazardly (un)organized spaces. The intermodal transportation center designed by Zaha Hadid for the outer limits of Strasbourg capitalizes on the very haphazardness of its suburban setting. With characteristic elegance and deceptive simplicity, Hadid managed to reconcile the ubiquitous car with the dense historic fabric of Strasbourg, a city that lies near France's border with Germany. The architect folded a zone of concrete up from the ground to form a canopy that stretches diagonally across bus and tram lanes toward the parking lot and Strasbourg beyond, as though pulled in that direction. The lots demonstrate Hadid's assumption that the buses and trams are a permanently impermanent part of the station's overall organization and composition, and the cars that park there are treated as natural phenomena with their own diurnal rhythms.