It tries to be a reference pointin Oxford, because, according to the director of the Middle East’s Center, the Zaha Hadid‘s Investcorp Building is a product of its time, a building that reflects the curiosity and profits of the 21st century.
Not without controversy, the waving structure is finally based on connecting to buildings that conform the evidence of the Victorian traditional architecture and Tudor revival style.
The surface directly reflects the world to which it belongs: time, clouds, light, movement are registered like a self-consciousness screen, something like “the future is here“, and to some degree, it was always there: as an organization, the Middle East’s Centre, founded on 1957, foments the integration and investigation of the Middle East in this British university centre since then.
Inside this new structure of stainless steel sheets, perforated by skylights, a reading room, an archive, an auditorium and a gallery are converging; the bath of natural light enables an optimised system of air conditioning and each space unit is designed and adapted according to its specific function, whether in the acoustic adaptation or the conservation of archives in paper, for example.
White dominates the surfaces and, among the endings, materials like oak veneer, concrete and micro terrazzo, contrasting with the polished outside surfaces, but in communion with the infinite lines, curved, fluid, without obstacles, so characteristic of Zaha Hadid.
