Zaha Hadid's first posthumous project could be Italy's next big tourist attraction

Cruise ships regularly disgorge thousands of passengers to visit attractions beyond the docks, but in the case of Salerno, this ancient and gracious Italian city of 133,000 people south of Naples, the first must-see site may soon become the maritime terminal itself, created by the architect Zaha Hadid and inaugurated Monday.

On the long approach from the sea, the flowing, horizontal silhouette of this all-concrete structure, bracketed fore and aft by leaning walls, stands out from the heavyset classicised buildings along the waterfront promenade. Thinking of that distant view across water, visualising the possibilities, Hadid had scoped out the site from a police boat before finalising the design that won a 2000 competition.

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi visited the site Sunday, calling it a masterpiece. The absence of Hadid, 65, who died on March 31 without ever seeing the finished terminal, was keenly felt both days. In a valedictory tribute, Salerno has honoured her with a portrait posted throughout the city, and in a collegial tribute, half of her 400-person office flew in from London to celebrate the work.

 

An artist's impression of the Salerno cruise ship terminal.

 

In a country where regions and cities have developed strong identities over centuries, Vincenzo de Luca - until recently the mayor of Salerno and now the governor of the Campania region - was looking for a functional building with a strong and singular presence that would also express the city's individuality. As a matter of urban planning policy, beauty mattered.

The city commissioned the terminal to help alleviate congestion on its roads and encourage a sustainable way to explore the region, port to port. The futuristic design has precedent in Italy: Since the 1920s, officials intent on industrialising the country have commissioned progressive buildings in Modernist styles, first for train stations, such as those in Florence, Naples and Rome, and then highway rest-stop structures.

Officials describe the maritime terminal as a key to the city's environmental and financial planning, with aspirations for tourism. Once the harbour is deepened, the expectation is that cruise liners will join ferries and hydrofoils already plying the fabled Amalfi and the less travelled Cilento coasts.

As seen from the sea and from the waterfront promenade of the crescent bay that curves into the distance, Hadid's rippling roof parallels the horizon line of the water and captures a sense of flow and movement. Both ends of the long building lean out, like prows, recalling ships and energising the silhouette. At night the brilliantly lighted building glows like a lantern.

Inside, the building is an intricate gavotte of interlocked functions and juxtaposed ramps and balconies.

"We thought of the building as an oyster, with a hard shell top and bottom, and a softer, liquid, more organic interior," said Paola Cattarin, the project architect.

Hadid's office has often designed museums and cultural centres, building types that allow wide design latitude. But a ship terminal functions more like an airport, with fixed requirements such as departure and arrival areas, as well as secondary routes for baggage, and administrative offices and building services.

After showing their passports and tickets, departing travellers step onto gently sloping ramps that swoop through the cavernous entry hall, connecting the upper level to the dock level below. The paths are self-guiding, with slopes and sightlines cuing visitors, rather then relying on signage. Ramps and walls relate to each other, curves sweeping against curves in a spatially rich interplay entirely at home in a country that invented Baroque space.

The architects took advantage of Salerno's dependable winds to design natural ventilation for the interior, which they warmed with blond woods.

Then came the on-again-off-again construction process, which lasted over a dozen years. Cattarin attributed delays to contractor bankruptcies, extended bidding periods, funding delays, and a slow bureaucracy: the process gave renewed understanding to why Rome wasn't built in a day. (The timeline for Hadid's projects in China, even larger and more complex than Salerno's, is less than two years, the firm says.)

"Too many laws, too much bureaucracy," de Luca said. "The intervals were long here, and also financing arrived very slowly." The 50,000-square-foot building cost €15 million.

The maritime terminal actually represents an older generation of work in the Hadid office, when the architects were still designing with physical models and hand drawings, though computers were first being introduced.

Hadid had made her reputation with angular designs that appear to explode, the shards and fragments propelled by forces coursing through energy fields. The Salerno terminal was designed in a transitional period as she abandoned fragmentation in favour of the flowing forms and space encouraged by the computer.

Hadid was awarded the competition in an unusual week of successes, when she also won for a ski jump in Austria and a science museum in Germany, buildings that would help form the basis for winning the Pritzker Prize for architecture in 2004.

"It was an intense moment for the office," Cattarin said. "We were still a small office of 15 or 20."

Hadid had spent more than a decade building very few projects, and the week represented a moment when her thesis investigations, research and visionary proposals were at last becoming real.

The terminal, though unique in its form and abstraction in this predominantly traditional city, was designed contextually. "We studied how the water joined the landscape, and we responded to the cultural context," Cattarin said.

The aquatic topography of the roof was designed as a shell structure, and engineered so that its creases, depressions and curves support the wide, column-free spans. The team of architects, which included Patrik Schumacher, who spoke for the office at Monday's ceremony in a torrential downpour, designed the interiors so that spaces would echo the way the old medieval city at the core of Salerno climbs up and down its hillside, with narrow lanes that open to piazzas and avenues near the water.

"We wanted to create the effect of contraction and expansion," Cattarin said.

The construction of the terminal was something of a slow-motion civic event. As it was built, citizens became curious, and for some the construction site became part of evening stroll. A crowd gathered before and after dinner to witness one all-night push to pour the concrete for the roof.

In this heartland of classicism, settled by the ancient Greeks, this radically contemporary terminal could very well join the temples of Paestum and even the Roman ruins of Pompeii as one of the area's monuments.

With the death of Hadid, the inauguration also became a chance for grateful citizens to say farewell to an architect who had given their city a monument of unexpected beauty. Posters went up around the city featuring a picture of Hadid, with lines that read: "Goodbye Zaha Hadid, Genius and Modernity. Inspiration and Transformation, Light that takes shape. Salerno will proudly care for and cherish the Maritime Terminal."