42nd Street Hotel was Zaha Hadid Architects’ invited entry in the 1995 competition for the redevelopment of Times Square, New York. Positioned at the corner of 42nd Street and 8th Avenue, the site was a linchpin of a larger urban project to rejuvenate a key stretch of Manhattan. The building’s programme called for a hybrid identity: a hotel, retail spaces, restaurants and television production facilities. Although Hadid’s scheme was ultimately not selected, the project stands as her first skyscraper proposal and an early attempt to create fluidity from street to building.
The design for the hotel defied conventional skyscraper typologies. It was envisioned as a ‘vertical street–a tower of towers’, which can be seen in the painting. Emphasised at the low corner of the tower, the sidewalk swirls upwards into the building as a spiralling floor plate, blurring the boundaries between public and private. Composed of interlocking architectural fragments, this transition rises vertically. Stacked into volumetric articulations, each tower fragment has its own façade and internal logic, tracing distinct yet interconnected zones of hospitality, entertainment and business.
Framed as a microcosm of urban intensity, this complex foregrounds Hadid’s enduring engagement with how public space can seep through into the building design. It exemplifies design strategies first explored in Grand Buildings, Trafalgar Square (1985) where the street sweeps up, curving around the site and merging with the complex. More subtly, these ideas would later be implemented in the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati (1997-2003), Hadid’s first complete project in the USA, where the street serves as a seamless architectural element, connecting form, circulation and programme.
Design Team
Zaha Hadid, Douglas Grieco, Peter Ho, Clarissa Matthews, Anne Save de Beaureceuil, Voon Yee-Wong, Woody K.T. Yao, Paul Brislin, Graham Modlin, Patrik Schumacher, David Gomersall and Bijan Ganjei
Model
Richard Arminger
Images for Model
Dick Stracker
Computer Imagery
Rolando Kraeher
