Cairo Expo City / Zaha Hadid

We were just informed that Zaha Hadid Architects will be designing the Cairo Expo City, together with multi-disciplinary engineering consultancy Buro Happold, after a two phase competition.

This project follows the recently announced Stone Towers by ZHA in Cairo, Egypt.

The new Cairo Expo City will provide a facilities suitable for the international conference and exhibition industry, making Cairo more competitive in a global scale.

The facility will be located between the city and the airport. The project includes 450,000sqm for exhibition and conferences, and also two office towers (31 and 33 stories each) and a shopping centre.

A carving and sculpting process (related to the strong relation of the country with the Nile) has been used to divide the large exhibition and conference areas required for Cairo Expo City into clusters of individual buildings that have their own formal composition, yet each building relates to the overall design. A main north-south artery is carved through the design, with secondary streams converging at the centre to ease crowd traffic during event. The movement of people within these streams informs the building entrances on the site.

Works on site starts on October, 2009.