Between fluidity and resistance

Opposite Museum Park in Miami, United States, stands the One Thousand Museum, a 62-storey residential tower, one of the last works of Zaha Hadid, who passed away in 2016. Her studio, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), completes it at the end of 2019, led by project director Chris Lepine.

The elegant 62-storey, 216-meter-high tower boasts panoramic views of Biscayne Bay and is across from Museum Park, a popular 30-acre public park, home to various art and science museums. The One Thousand Museum is part of Zaha Hadid Architects’ recent focus on skyscrapers, with projects such as the Generali Tower in Milan, Wangjing Soho and Leeza Soho in Beijing. The concrete exoskeleton frees the surfaces inside the building from structural elements, for example by limiting the number of pillars, while providing lateral bracing of the walls to withstand the high winds of an area subject to cyclones. The building appears as a single continuous structure, with columns at its base that fan out to increase its strength. Miami’s first residential building with a helipad, it also includes 84 luxury apartments, complemented on the upper floors by a lounge, an events room and an aquatic center surrounded by a curved cave-shaped roof, immersed in a futuristic decor with bay windows opening infinitely onto the city. The multi-faceted transparent facade unfolds behind the envelope, illuminating the image of the building in contrast to the material solidity of its composition. The slight curvature of the shell creates dissimilarities in the floor plans at different levels; on the lower floors, the terraces cantilevered from the corners, while on the upper floors, they are integrated behind the structure.