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Zaha Hadid Architects’ digital archive of the Phaeno Science Centre donated to the Canadian Centre for Architecture as part of Archaeology of the Digital: Complexity and Convention exhibition

Until October 16, 2016
Montreal, Canada

Curated by Greg Lynn, Complexity and Convention is the third and final exhibition of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s (CCA) Archaeology of the Digital program, in which 25 seminal projects are collected, catalogued, preserved, and made available for research. The project constitutes a precise inquiry into the relationship between architecture and digital technologies in order to increase understanding of the design process while addressing the challenges of preserving digital archives and ensuring their future accessibility.

Archaeology of the Digital is a long-term, multifaceted project initiated by the CCA in 2012 and led by Greg Lynn that reflects on how digital technologies have progressively redefined architectural practice and reshaped architectural theory. The project is comprised of in-depth research into digital architecture and a historical reading of its trajectory from early experiments in the 1980s to the early 2000s.

Completed in 2005, Zaha Hadid Architects’ Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, Germany is included within these 25 projects which form part of an ambitious acquisition strategy that establishes a cohesive history of this transformative period in architecture. Complexity and Convention shows commonalities, hybridizations, and crosspollinations of the digital medium and methods.

The Phaeno Science Centre is one of Zaha Hadid Architects’ most ambitious, complex and fluid spaces. Ruled by a very specific system based on an unusual volumetric structural logic, the centre is supported and structured by funnel-shaped cones protruding into it and extending from it. Its floors are neither piled above each other nor could the centre be seen as a single volume. The Phaeno combines formal and geometric complexity with structural audacity and material authenticity.

 

CCA: Archaeology of the Digital: Complexity and Convention

CCA: Press release

New York Times: ‘Science Centre Celebrates an Industrial Cityscape’