A magical sculpture towering over the city.
When Zaha Hadid won the architectural competition for the new Wolfsburg Science Centre in 2000, hardly anyone could have imagined what was to come. “The most ambitious and comprehensive statement of our quest for complex, dynamic and fluid spaces” — that is how she described the project herself, even before the first digger touched the ground.
What emerged is a building of radical independence: 170 metres long, 16 metres high, perched on ten hollow concrete cones, the so-called ‘Cones’. The structure towers over the street, revealing the space beneath as a novel, covered urban landscape with gentle hills and valleys. Anyone viewing the phaeno from the outside sees not a building in the conventional sense — but something that appears to have landed. A concrete spaceship resting on nine-metre-high stilts, seemingly defying gravity.
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CONESTen conical concrete columns support the entire building. Each is hollow, has a diameter of up to 7 metres and houses a distinct function — ranging from a science theatre to an ideas forum.
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CAST-IN-PLACE CONCRETE CONSTRUCTIONPhaeno is Europe’s largest structure built from self-compacting concrete — a material that had never before been used on this scale in Germany and required special permission.
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RIGHT ANGLESSloping planes, pointed walls, soaring roofs: inside, the perspective shifts with every step. Craters, caves, terraces and plateaus form a walk-in sculpture.
The phaeno became an extreme engineering challenge. The Wolfsburg building authority had to grant “special approval” for the self-compacting concrete. Problems with the structural analysis and concrete mix necessitated extensive repairs to the completed support cone 6 — which, in keeping with its own educational mission, also turned the phaeno into a real-life experimental landscape for construction technology.
The result: The British Guardian ranks the phaeno among the twelve most significant modern buildings in the world. The Financialist included it in its list of the seven modern wonders of the world. The building won the RIBA European Award in 2006 as well as the Institution of Structural Engineers Award — and helped its creator achieve the worldwide recognition that had long eluded her.
phaeno Architecture Station.
Visitors to phaeno today will find a digital architecture station at the heart of the exhibition – an experience that turns the building itself into an exhibit. Developed using state-of-the-art technology, it offers a drone flight through the interior and exterior spaces, interactive 3D models of the building and faithful animations from the design phase — including digital simulations that represented a revolution for the architectural team over 20 years ago.
Exclusive video interviews with Christos Passas, the former project manager at Zaha Hadid Architects, and with Prof. Hanif Kara, the project’s structural engineer, provide deep insights into the building’s history. The station was developed in collaboration with the Zaha Hadid Foundation and Zaha Hadid Architects.
From Baghdad to the very top.
Zaha Hadid was born on 31 October 1950 in Baghdad, into a wealthy, cosmopolitan family. Her family home was one of the first Bauhaus-style buildings in Baghdad. Even as a child, she redesigned her own bedroom. By the age of eleven, she knew she wanted to become an architect.
She studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, moved to London in 1972 and enrolled at the legendary Architectural Association — where she would become a student, later a lecturer and eventually an icon. She worked at Rem Koolhaas’ OMA, founded her own practice in 1979, and embarked on a career that would long be dogged by the word “unbuildable”.
“I am a woman. I am Arab. I am an architect. And I build. Why should that be the exception?”
— Zaha Hadid
For years, she won competitions whose winning designs were never realised. The world admired her drawings — but dared not build them. In 1982, her award-winning design for “The Peak Leisure Club” in Hong Kong caused a worldwide sensation; it was never built. It was not until 1993 that the ice was broken: Rolf Fehlbaum of Vitra dared to build her fire station in Weil am Rhein. Weil am Rhein became a place of pilgrimage for architects from all over the world.
What followed was a rise without parallel. When she was awarded the Pritzker Prize — the Nobel Prize of architecture — in 2004, she was not only the first woman ever to receive this honour. At 53, she was also one of the youngest laureates ever. Pritzker juror Frank Gehry remarked: “Every project unfolds with fresh excitement and innovation.”
She was a thorn in the side. She was seen as difficult, uncompromising, too ambitious. She knew it. “I don’t know if I work differently from a man,” she once said laconically, “I’ve never been a man.” What bothered her most was that her male colleagues were never asked about their clothing or their management style. She refused to play the role of the exceptional woman. She simply wanted to be the best female architect in the world.
What remains when concrete flows.
Zaha Hadid Architects continues to operate under the leadership of her long-standing partner, Patrik Schumacher. Projects on every continent bear her signature: the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, the Guangzhou Opera House, the Aquatics Centre for the London Olympics, and the Messner Mountain Museum Corones in South Tyrol — one of her last completed projects. The world keeps turning, and everywhere on it are curves she left behind.
And in Wolfsburg stands phaeno. It welcomes school groups and families, architecture enthusiasts and the curious. It is at once a science museum and a walk-in sculpture, a place of learning and a spatial artwork. It is the most complete testament to what architecture can achieve when someone is prepared to risk everything for it.
On 31 March 2026 — ten years after her death — we remember a woman who did not listen when people told her something was unbuildable. The answer to that stands in Wolfsburg, on ten concrete cones, 16 metres above the ground. Many thanks and great respect, Zaha Hadid.
