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Zaha Hadid is busy designing everything from towers to lamps to shoes. The latest project by Zaha Hadid Architects is Stone Towers for Egyptian-based Rooya Group, located in the Stone Park district of Cairo.

(Image courtesy: Zaha Hadid Architects)

Providing office and retail facilities to a rapidly expanding Cairo, the unique 525,000square metres Stone Towers development also includes a five-star business hotel with serviced apartments, retail with food and beverage facilities and sunken landscaped gardens and plaza called the ‘Delta’. Hisham Shoukri, CEO of Rooya Group said, “The Stone Towers needed an architect with daring ideas, innovation, international expertise and experience…it needed Zaha Hadid.” Ancient Egyptian stonework incorporates a vast array of patterns and textures that, when illuminated by the intense sunlight of the region, creates animated displays of light and shadow. The facades on the North and South elevations of each building within Stone Towers adopts a rich vocabulary of alternating protrusions, recesses and voids to enhance the deep reveal shadow lines that accentuate the curvatures of each building within the development and animate the project throughout the day.

(Image courtesy: Zaha Hadid Architects)

“I am delighted to be working in Cairo, states Hadid. “I have visited Egypt many times and I have always been fascinated by the mathematics and arts of the Arab world. In our office we have always researched the formal concepts of geometry - which relates a great deal to the region’s art traditions and sciences in terms of algebra, geometry and mathematics. This research has informed the design for Stone Towers. “With a large-scale project such as the Stone Towers, care must be taken to balance a necessary requirement for repetitive elements whilst avoiding an uncompromising repetition of static building masses.” states Hadid. “The architecture of Stone Towers pursues a geometric rhythm of similar, interlocking, yet individually differentiated building forms that creates a cohesive composition.”

GENESY Lamp for Artemide

Launched at Salone del Mobile, Zaha Hadid Architects’ exploration and research into systems of growth in the natural world have informed the distinct formal language of the Genesy lamp for Artemide. As in the organic development of trees, a sweeping canopy emerges through an extensive interconnected supporting network at the base

(Images courtesy: Zaha Hadid Architects)

The primary components of this organic analogy are transformed from abstract diagrams into Genesy’s fluid design. The lamp’s structure increases in complexity as it rises from the floor.  Like a growing organism, the central support sprouts branches that adopt a greater radial geometry to enhance the dynamic tensional forces of the structure. Nature continues to inform the design as these branches frame voids, enhancing the contrast between positive and negative, convex and concave, tension and compression.

Zaha Hadid for LACOSTE

LACOSTE will launch the footwear capsule collection designed in collaboration with Zaha Hadid Architects in September 2009. Initially previewed in October 2008 during the Frieze Art Fair in London, the final design prototype will soon go into production. The Zaha Hadid for LACOSTE footwear collaboration began with a digitised interpretation of surfaces with repeated patterns.

“The design expression behind the collaboration with LACOSTE footwear allows the evolution of dynamic fluid grids,” explains Hadid. “When wrapped around the shape of a foot, these expand and contract to negotiate and adapt to the body ergonomically. In doing so a landscape emerges, undulating and radiating as it merges seamlessly with the body.” This is not the first time that Hadid has designed shoes, having earlier designed for well-known Brazilian brand Melissa.