The ArRiyadh Development Authority recently announced that Zaha Hadid Architects will build the new King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) Metro Station in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The 20,434 sq. m. King Abdullah Financial Disctrict Metro Station – to be completed in four years – will contribute to serve the fast-growing population of the city, that now boasts 5 million residents, while serving as interchange on the network for Line 1, as well as the terminus of Line 4 (for passengers to the airport) and Line 6 of the new Riyadh Metro.
The new building will be characterised by a lattice-like patterning on the façade (that will reduce solar gain) defined by a sequence of opposing and dynamic sine-waves that act as the spine for the building’s circulation. The sine-waves embedded in the building were inspired by the sand dunes sculpted by desert winds.
Sine-waves or sinusoids, that is mathematical curves that are usually employed to describe a smooth repetitive oscillation, occur in pure and applied mathematics, as well as physics, engineering, signal processing and many other fields.
The architectural studio, whose Riverside Museum in Glasgow has just won the European Museum of the Year Award, moved from sand dunes since they represent complex natural formations generated by frequencies and repetition, and based its research for this futuristic shape also on symmetry and scaling and on concepts borrowed from harmonics, including amplitude and initial phase.
The most interesting point in this sort of contemporary architectural structures is that they seem to offer us a physical representation of mathematical ideas without sacrificing design ambitions: in 1807 Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier established a fundamental theorem which is used in linear systems analysis. Its core idea stated that any waveform can be synthesized by combining a specific set of pure sine-waves in appropriate phase relationships.
A pure sine-wave in the temporal domain extends forever, with no beginning and no end; a pure sine-wave in the spatial domain extends indefinitely in space. In a way this structure will look like a complex Fourier series smoothly simplified (to eliminate sharp corners), characterised and optimised by a parametric variable.
All renders courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects
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