Qatar is planning on building two buildings designed by the late Iraqi-British iconic architect, Zaha Hadid, which will include a desert-flower shaped tower near the site of the 2022 soccer World Cup final, a member of its ruling family said on Tuesday, according to Reuters.
In 2013, Hadid was commissioned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad Al Thani, the brother of Qatar’s Emir to create a 38-storey hotel in the form of a hyacinth, while featuring a nine-pointed base to shield visitors from the Gulf sun.
The constructed tower is being “designed in response to current and future environmental challenges” by 2020 in the city of Lusail, 23 km north of the capital Doha,” Sheikh Mohammed’s Al Alfia Holding said in a statement.
“We often look at nature’s systems when we work to create environments, at her unrivaled logic and coherence,” Hadid, who died in March, said.
Hadid’s architecture firm ZHA is expected to complete 36 projects that had been started on or were underway before Hadid’s passing, including an oyster-like ferry terminal in Salerno, Italy, the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center in Riyadh, and the Mathematics Gallery at London’s Science Museum, the firm announced in April.