Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center, Performing arts center in Baku, Azerbaijan.
The Heydar Aliyev Center is a cultural complex on Heydar Aliyev Avenue in Baku, designed by Zaha Hadid after a 2007 competition. Its single continuous white surface folds up from the landscape with almost no straight lines, rising over eight floor levels. Inside are a 1,000-seat auditorium, exhibition halls, a conference center, workshops and a museum.
The center was established by a decree of President Ilham Aliyev on 29 December 2006, on the 16-hectare site of the former Sattarkhan factory, which was relocated. Zaha Hadid won the 2007 design competition and the foundation was laid on 10 September 2007. It opened on 10 May 2012, the 89th anniversary of Heydar Aliyev's birth, and won the Design Museum's Design of the Year award in 2014.
The center is named after Heydar Aliyev, Soviet Azerbaijan's first secretary from 1969 to 1982 and president of Azerbaijan from 1993 to 2003. Its Mini Azerbaijan display on the second floor holds models of 24 historical and architectural buildings, from the Maiden Tower to the Flame Towers, labelled in Azerbaijani and English.
The complex sits on Heydar Aliyev Avenue and includes an underground car park and a 13.58-hectare park with two decorative ponds and an artificial lake. The exhibition halls occupy a nine-storey section with a restaurant and cafe, while the four-storey Auditorium block holds two conference rooms and a media centre. Interactive information kiosks inside give details on the centre and its events.
The roof spans 4 hectares and is covered with 12,027 panels of varying sizes cut into triangles, rectangles, trapezoids and parallelograms. The steel structure built for the project totals 90 km in length. The building was featured in the Discovery and Science Channel series Build It Bigger, where host Danny Forster said it was a way for the country to assert its place in the world.
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