Jockey Club Innovation Tower
Jockey Club Innovation Tower is a building of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University located on Chatham Road South in Hung Hom district, Kowloon. It was designed by Pritzker-prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid. This building is her first permanent work in Hong Kong. Originally expected to be completed by the end of 2011, it was not finished until mid-2013.
Zaha Hadid's firm won the competition to design the building in 2007. The competition brief called for "a beacon structure symbolizing and driving the development of Hong Kong as a design hub in Asia." She and her team took as their guiding principle the "collateral flexibility between the departments to be housed in the building.
Their solution was to "dissolve ... the classic typography of tower and podium to create a seamlessly fluid new structure ... creating a building which is inherently organized and understood to visitors from the point of entry. Athletic fields surrounding the building were razed to create a new surrounding landscape. The main pedestrian entrance was placed at podium level, as with the other buildings on campus. A long pathway from nearby Suen Chi Sun Memorial Square to an open foyer creates a focal point, where the building space opens to shops, a cafeteria, museum, and exhibition area
About the Architect
Zaha Mohammad Hadid was an Iraqi-British architect. She was the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 2004. She received the UK's most prestigious architectural award, the Stirling Prize, in 2010 and 2011. In 2012, she was made a Dame by Elizabeth II for services to architecture, and in 2015 she became the first and only woman to be awarded the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects.
She was described by The Guardian of London as the "Queen of the curve", who "liberated architectural geometry, giving it a whole new expressive identity". Her major works include the aquatic centre for the London 2012 Olympics, Michigan State University's Broad Art Museum in the US, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Guangzhou Opera House in China, and the Beijing Daxing International Airport, also in China.
Some of her awards have been presented posthumously, including the statuette for the 2017 Brit Awards. Several of her buildings were still under construction at the time of her death, including the Daxing airport and the Al Wakrah Stadium in Qatar, a venue for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.