Zaha Hadid_Contemporary Arts Centre

The Contemporary Arts Center, founded in 1939, was one of the first institutions dedicated to exhibiting contemporary art. The new center, which opens to the public on June 7, will be available for temporary performances, exhibitions and site-specific installations.

Zaha Hadid designed the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art museum in downtown Cincinnati, which opened in 2003. Hadid is the first woman to design a major museum in the United States.

The obvious color contrast in the Deconstructivist layered exterior continues inside with a very loose and slipping arrangement of material. The CAC rather fits into the texture of the urban downtown, with no attempt to stand above or degrade the city architecture.

The ground floor invites the young and poor, a non-elitist "urban carpet" that leads through dynamic stairways to various levels of temporary art exhibits and curves into the very fabric of the form. The circulation carves voids out of the mass of the building.

Hadid has explained that her vision was non-elitist. Thus, she wanted the lobby area of the museum to serve as a kind of public square. Visually, this point is made through the "urban carpet": the sidewalk is pulled into the building and rises to become the back wall--providing a continuity between the outside and the inside.