Zaha Hadid, one of the UK’s leading architects, is a name well known throughout the Middle East: born in Baghdad in 1950, she has designed the Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre (construction on which will begin once the Guggenheim and Louvre are complete), and was awarded the contract for Dubai Opera House, where progress has stalled until the Emirate’s finances improve. The opening in 2011 of Guangzhou Opera House in China, however, gives a good idea of what can be expected when Hadid’s designs become reality in the UAE, but comes with a few caveats for the beleaguered construction industry.
These caveats are nothing to do with Hadid’s design, which is quite spectacular, echoing the sculptural flowing style that Santiago Calatrava developed in Valencia’s iconic opera house: in Hadid’s own words, the Guangzhou Opera House is a “Champagne coloured gold space.” This is true; yet it is so much more. Hadid’s lines, unlike Calatrava’s, spill, swell and surge without apparent reason, forming a truly organic structure.
Not everything has gone smoothly though.
When construction first began on the project in 2005 the site was surrounded by farmland, but as the opera house began to rise so did the city around it. Guangzhou was quickly outgrowing its traditional centre, based around the old city of Canton, and expanding into Pearl River New City. It hasn’t stopped, with the rate of construction being truly staggering: nothing in this new skyscraper city is more than about five years old. And therein lies the root of the problem – China’s rapid growth has a price, which often includes substandard workmanship.
Costing approximately £140m, Guangzhou Opera House may be a triumph for the architect, but is a disaster for the Chinese construction industry. Many of the 75,000 granite slabs that join to form the fluid lines of the building’s exterior, for instance, were so badly made that they are already being replaced, just a year after the building opened its doors for the first time. The local Southern Metropolis newspaper quoted experts saying that it was “beyond understanding” that panels should be falling off the walls and ceiling. Not complete understanding it seems though, with government officials claiming that the problem had been caused by the region’s intensely humid climate. The cracks, they said, were due to ‘normal shrinkage’.
Problems such as this are not confined to Guangzhou though, with hectic schedules throughout the country repeatedly causing concern in regard to building standards. In July 2009, a 13-floor tower fell on its side because of its shallow foundations in Shanghai.
The problems at Guangzhou Opera House have now been dealt with (for now) and the architecture has been globally applauded; architecture that can be observed in Hadid’s proposed new performance spaces in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Amman.
