Zaha Hadid Architects recently unveiled a new project in Beijing: Chaoyangmen Soho. The prestigous project will be a large residential and commercial structure.

From Zaha Hadid:

‘Soho City is the attempt to invent a new city nucleus on the south-east corner of the Fourth Ring, taking up the opportunity afforded by the new exhibition center planned there on the land of the Beijing Logistic Port. The urbanistic premise of this venture is that Beijing – despite its overarching concentric geometry – can only develop its vitality as a polycentric metropolis. Soho City will not add to the patchwork of urban dormitories that threaten to suffocate Beijings’s metropolitan potential.

Soho City has the ambition to break with the current pattern of sub-urbanization based on closed, monofunctional estates. Instead there is the vision to create a residential as well as live-work community that aspires to the kind of urbanity for which Soho in Manhattan has become the paradigmatic emblem.

Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher conceived Soho-City as a Fluid City which casts this aspiration towards urban vibrancy into a dynamic architectural form. The urban geometry is based upon a crossing point of converging lines. This geometry demonstrates a robust elasticity as it adapts itself to the shape of the territory and connects to the surrounding contexts.

The building mass that rises within this elastic geometry is animated by a common focus. The buildings are neither randomly scattered, nor controlled by the monotony of a grid. Instead they form a dynamic swarm that unifies a rich diversity of building types into a coherent formation that affords both moments of urban intensity and moments of intimacy. This method of generating unity from diversity creates a strong sense of urban character and identity that is legible from every point within as well as when viewed from a distance.’