A new urban centre on a soft grid: streets bent to meet the lines of their surroundings, blocks that morph by degrees from courtyards to towers as a height field rises towards the central spine, twisting towers at its peaks and a landform shell on the waterfront.
In 2006 Zaha Hadid Architects won the competition for a new sub-centre at Kartal-Pendik, on former industrial land on the Asian side of Istanbul. Patrik Schumacher later presented the scheme as the model of parametric urbanism. Its grid is neither imposed nor picturesque: the lines of the surrounding roads are carried into the site and bundled into a “soft grid” that bends and swells between them, with a wide spine along its main axis.
On this grid the blocks are not repeated but varied continuously. A single parameter carries each block from an open courtyard type, through blocks with one or two corner towers, to towers alone; a height field, rising towards the spine and the centre, sets each block’s parameter and height by its position. Landmark towers stand at the peaks of the field, and where the spine meets the water the ground rises into the roof of a cultural building. The result follows Schumacher’s heuristics: no rigid forms, no simple repetition, no collage, only gradual differentiation and correlation.
The geometry here is generated by a simple rule of the same kind, not traced from the masterplan.