Invisible Icon: Zaha’s Investcorp Building Reflects Its Oxford Surroundings

If there is one thing that Zaha Hadid Architects is known for, it’s standing out from the crowd with her signature style. From the swooping concrete planes of the MAXXI Museum in Rome to the gleaming white curves of the extraordinary Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, the British-Iraqi designer has made her name with the boldest of architectural gestures, willfully incongruous and deliberately defiant of their surroundings.

A visit to the London-based studio’s latest building, then, may evoke a degree of surprise for those accustomed to the firm’s typically radical approach. The Investcorp Building, a new addition to the Middle East Centre at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, is by no means a shrinking violet: its sinuous silhouette and metallic cladding still bears many hallmarks of Hadid’s brand of liquescent architecture, creating a striking juxtaposition with the surrounding buildings. However, key differences between this project and the firm’s previous work suggests an evolution: context has driven this design more than perhaps any ZHA structure to date.

The architects were tasked with creating additional space to accommodate the Middle East Centre’s expanding library and archive relating to the Arab world from the 1800s to today as well as a lecture theater with a capacity of 117. The primary challenge was to incorporate all of these features within a compact space between two existing buildings that one of which was a former church rectory that had housed the archive for the last 37 years. Built in 1887, this historic structure stands in contrast to the more modern Gateway Building — designed by Bennetts Associates and completed in 2013 — and the brutalist mass of the Hilda Besse Building, a typically uncompromising addition from the 1970s that houses the college’s dining hall.

This melting pot of architectural styles is garnished with a large, century-old Sequoia tree — the subject of a preservation order, naturally — to top off a list of contextual considerations that would give any architect a headache. For this reason, the sculpted form of Hadid’s new addition was derived much more by its surroundings than many of her previous parametric landmarks, which have frequently been positioned in isolation, unconstrained by such strict site conditions.

At its taller end, the Investcorp Building faces up to the hulking concrete façade of the brutalist hall, coming in at a similar height but with a substantially lighter aesthetic thanks to its refined material palette of steel and glass. The structure contorts as it flows down toward the original archive building, contracting to avoid the precious Sequoia and terminating at the rear of the old rectory. The sinuous form fills a gap between the existing buildings, forming a new square at the heart of the college and strengthening the boundary along Woodstock Road.

Thus, Hadid has adapted her trademark affinity for curvilinear forms as a rigorous response to the context, culminating in a building that evokes a stretched piece of organic tissue, a sinuous muscle, or ligament pulled taut between the eclectic bones of the surrounding architecture. This outlandish quality bears similarities to Renzo Piano’s bulbous Pathé Foundation in Paris, though Hadid’s intervention is markedly more subtle thanks largely to its mirrored surface, which reflects every stone, brick, and branch in the vicinity.

The organic qualities of the building extend to the roof, where a series of 25 skylights tapers to address the sun. A three-pronged array of porthole protuberances, the teardrop-shaped apertures are at once organic and alien, a nod to the portals protruding from Archigram’s only completed building, the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria. The overriding appearance of the building’s exterior, though, is most reminiscent of a musical instrument, a vaguely sonorous volume atop a concrete plinth.

Inside, the palette is characteristically slick, with oak veneer staircases, perforated acoustic panels on many walls, and smooth concrete floors throughout the common areas. Sculpted, white walls around the underside of staircases and across the curving ceilings are cut with slender channels that hide integrated LEDs, supplemented with ample amounts of natural light to create optimum conditions for research. Hidden beneath a new grass lawn, the subterranean lecture theater is formed from warm timber cladding that wraps around the walls and ceiling.

The Investcorp Building is something of an architectural paradox. The gleaming structure possesses countless characteristics of a classic ZHA creation, packed with ‘Hadidisms’ that have come to define this firm’s global portfolio, but it also brings new ideas to the table: it attempts to bridge the gap between neo-futurism and more context-sensitive genres, striving to reconcile an inherently extroverted style with a form of architectural camouflage. The result is that rarest of things: a building that flirts with both iconicity and invisibility simultaneously.

However you define it, Zaha Hadid’s tubular intervention provides a compelling addition to what must surely be the most eclectic array of educational structures anywhere in the world. One wonders what can possibly come next in the curious life of St. Antony’s College.