Design of a VIP hall to welcome and bid farewell to the state presidents and an aircraft hangar in Erbil town has been requested. Having two independent entrances, the hangar provides space for one passenger aircraft and two helicopters. At the same time, there is also a warehouse which houses adequate spare parts required for the maintenance. This warehouse is accessible directly from outside through the service road. The two-storied VIP hall hosts an acceptance hall, meeting room, working offices, dining hall and resting places. Its common wall with the hangar is designed as an internal garden. In contract to the modern style in the architecture, the interior space features a classical design in compliance with the regional traditions. The structure also includes the air control center.
Daniel Libeskind unveils the design for The Kurdistan Museum at the Bloomberg Businessweek Design conference in San Francisco. Libeskind will present the design for a building that will create the first major center in the Kurdistan Region for the history and culture of the Kurdish people.
Aura, the new city center for Erbil, creates an iconic skyline in vein with that of major metropolitan areas. The design uses the diagram of an equalizer to achieve an iconic skyline, and ultimate flexibility of program and area distribution. The buildings form two wings which embrace the parkland in between, allowing for not only for a dynamic landscape within the park, but also maximizing the natural light and ventilation into the park and underground retail center. The landscape within this park is designed using a series of interchangeable modules which act as pools, tree planters, pavilions, and grass panels. These intensive operations resulted in a matrix that not only directed the physical implementation of each wing, guided the carve-out of their massing, but also laid out their interior partitioning and their exterior landscaping. The consequence of this unique system of modular variation across all levels and all scales results in perfect alignments between interior and exterior spaces. In summary, this unifying system, or matrix, successfully unites landscaping, architectural and interior design in one operation.
This project, completed in early 2013, is our Competition winning proposal for the Olympic Swimming Pool Arena in Erbil, Kurdistan. The project represents a continuation in our on-going exploration of formal and programmatic variations, which started with our design for the Eternity Tower in Dubai and continues throughout much of our work, most recently with the Catholic Church of the Transfiguration, in Lagos.
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