Just when you thought Zaha Hadid couldn’t be any busier, there comes another amazing project. Does the lady ever stop working? The Pritzker Prize winning architect has designed The Zaragoza Bridge Pavilion in Spain that is not just a bridge but also an engineering feat. The pavilion is organised around four main elements, or “pods”, that perform both as structural elements and as spatial enclosures, where each ‘pod’ corresponds to a specific exhibition space.


Expo Zaragoza originally envisaged the concept of an enclosed exhibition pavilion spanning the river. For this reason, the structure is largely visible and plays an important role in defining the Bridge Pavilion’s external envelope.

The Bridge Pavilion represents over 30 years of detailed research and examination by Zaha Hadid into bridge design. “We like projects which are structurally ambitious and I think the Bridge Pavilion illustrates the excellent symbiotic relationship we have with engineers,” says Hadid. “Our ambitions towards creating fluid, dynamic and therefore complex structures has been aided by technological innovations, and applying this knowledge to the Bridge Pavilion has been a very rewarding process.”

The hybrid nature of the Zaragoza Bridge Pavilion represented the perfect challenge for Zaha Hadid Architects. The design merges two traditionally distinct and separate building typologies: the “infrastructure” element (the bridge) and an “architectural” element (the pavilion). With the Bridge Pavilion design, Zaha Hadid Architects has challenged the conventional idea of a bridge being purely engineering.

“As the Bridge Pavilion is not one particular building typology, this really adds to the richness of the spaces inside,” explains Hadid. “We build the complexity of all our projects in relationship to the inherent complexity of the program, but then clarify the diagram as much as possible to be a logical configuration. This is evident in our design for the Bridge Pavilion. All the forces operate at the same time, so that the view of the exhibition is inherently related to nature of the visitors’ path through the Bridge Pavilion - but equally, the experience of the path shifts according to what the viewer is seeing at a given moment.”

Images courtesy: Zaha Hadid Architects/Photographer Luke Hayes.