The history of this project began four years ago, when Hadid was invited by the city authorities to participate in a closed competition for the design of the new building of the concert hall - the "City Casino" - and the reconstruction of the old one. In January 2005, her proposal was declared the best, and in the summer of 2006 the architect presented its final version, revised in accordance with the requirements of the townspeople (they were not satisfied with the high cost and large size of the future building). In January 2007, the Grand Council (parliament) of the canton of Baselstadt approved Zaha Hadid's project.
To start construction, only the consent of the city residents was needed, since we are talking about a state project. As a result, with a 50% voter turnout, 37.4% (about 21,000 citizens who reached the age of 20) supported the decision of the Grand Council, while 62.6% (almost 36,000) rejected it.
Although the customers of the project and those who sympathized with them were not surprised by the negative result, such a significant advantage of their opponents came as a surprise to them.
In the opinion of the politicians supporting the project, appeal to the opinion of the people in aesthetic matters leads to stagnation, since the majority always advocates preserving the existing situation. In the modern history of Basel, such situations are not uncommon, and if Hadid's project can be called ambiguous, then, for example, Santiago Calatrava's proposal for a new Wettstein bridge in the 1990s was rejected almost without any reason, and the original project of the Spanish architect was replaced by a banal version. Leading local architects Herzog & de Meuron also suffered from this approval procedure: in 2003 they failed to build a multiplex cinema in their hometown.
