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Technology: Moulded Room Shells for a Hotel Floor by Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid is well known for her highly expressive architectural designs. Dynamic shapes - pointed, angled or curved - are her trademark. However, these are not always easy to realise. Not without reason it took a long time for this now famous architect to be able to finally build one of her many competition-winning designs. Her buildings are now a familiar and accepted part of our modern architectural landscape. Often forgotten, however, is that behind those dynamically shaped concrete sculptures is a tremendous technical challenge and achievement.

Technology: Moulded Room Shells for a Hotel Floor by Zaha Hadid
© Hotel Puerta América

This was also the case with the floor of rooms that Zaha Hadid designed for the Hotel Puerta America in Madrid. Although the end result may look like an easily constructed flowing landscape (see Documentation section, p. 314 f. ), it was in fact a complex technical challenge. The walls, ceiling and furniture in these rooms form a single, continuous surface – adding to the complexity are the ever changing contours.

In order to be able to produce the three-dimensional room shell, it was necessary first to find the right material. The one chosen is a synthetic material called LG HI-MACS from a Korean manufacturer – a material that is used in making kitchen counters, for example. It consists of about two-thirds mineral compound (aluminium-trihydrate) and one third acrylic resin; moreover it is thermoformable, a key criterion for the complicated task it was to perform. In addition the material is very easy to clean, thanks to its pore-free surface. Also it is scratch-resistant, shockproof and conforms to fire-resistance grade B1.

The far from everyday job of fabricating these sculpted rooms was entrusted to Rosskopf & Partner, specialists in working with mineral-based materials. First a model of the hotel room was created, in a scale of 1:10, plus an original-sized model of the complex top part of the sofa. From the architects the company received not the usual construction drawings, but a digital 3D model which was divided into individual segments. From this the data for making the mould was derived, then fed into CNC machines that milled the mould parts out of MDF. The complicated contours of the surfaces had to match the requirements very precisely, with very tight tolerances. The precut sections of synthetic material were then thermoformed on these mould sections.

Although LG HI-MACS is classified as part of the group of thermoformable materials, its thermoformability is normally regarded as limited, because the mineral components in the material can only be encouraged to flow to a certain extent. In this project, however, it was possible to achieve smaller minimum radii and larger curved surfaces by using higher forming temperatures and longer forming times. The moulded modules were then mounted onto a frame of MDF, and fitted together and glued on site. Finally the joints were sanded to make them invisible.

For each room with bathroom around 250 individual sections were moulded, but there were four different styles of room and two styles of suite. The moulded sections were fitted to an unfinished floor and ceiling and to pre-erected plasterboard partition walls. All the cabling and pipework for the air-conditioning systems and waste water from the floor above had to be run through the floor deck. Deviations of up to 17 cm arose, which were compensated by the lighting fold in the ceiling and changing the length of the bed from 200 to 190 cm.

As well as the technical challenges this project presented, it was also a significant logistical effort. At peak times five trucks per week set off from Germany to the Spanish capital, arriving at times that were carefully determined in advance, a precision necessary because of the limited capacity of the cranes at the inner-city building site. Up to 70 fitters were working on site at any one time, operating on a two-shift basis.

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