Elk Grove is a small young city located south of Sacramento, the capital of the state of California. Today, attracting not so many tourists, the city intends to seriously fight for its popularity, and for this very reason, in 2006, it held an international architectural competition for the project of a public center. This complex is intended not only to provide residents of Elk Grove with a new library, sports center and concert hall, but also to become a striking architectural attraction, the "new miracle" of America, capable of glorifying the city far beyond the United States. In total, 23 architectural firms from all over the world took part in the competition, and Zaha Hadid was recognized as the winner almost unanimously, who bribed the jury with both the bright design of the Community Center and the willingness to fill it with exactly the functions that local residents need.
Consultations with the city authorities and local residents have indeed taken place more than once. For more than two years, Zaha Hadid and her team have worked on the Community Center project, which eventually includes a hotel, convention center, library and museum for children, a contemporary art center and an extensive sports block. Outwardly, the complex is Hadid's favorite composition of fluid digital forms. The community center is treated as a single organism, the interior of which is conveniently connected to each other. In plan, it resembles a starfish, and is connected with the area of outdoor sports grounds and courts by two giant tentacles, for which the complex has been repeatedly compared to an octopus.
Last week, Zaha Hadid's architects held the final presentation of the Community Center project in Elk Grove, presenting the starfish to officials and experts in all its glory. And then the unexpected happened: the project, which five years ago seemed to the city to be innovative and as closely as possible to its ambitions, now frightened with its pretentiousness and absolute dissimilarity to everything that has already been built in Elk Grove. Mayor Steven Detrick admitted that he expected to hear the theme song from "Star Wars" at the moment when the architects began the presentation - how space and fantastic the design of the discussed complex seemed to him. The mayor was also supported by most of his colleagues, who compared the project with a “creature from another planet” and an octopus and stressed that neither one nor the other image corresponds to the character of the city and the main vector of its development. Discussion of the presentation dragged on until late evening, and as a result, the project was never accepted. “It seems that we accidentally caught too big a fish,” the mayor summed up the discussion.
The only thing for which Zaha Hadid's project has now received expert approval is for strict compliance with the requirements for building density. As for the architectural design of the complex, it was almost unanimously rejected, and the leadership of Elk Grove is already talking about the need for a new competition. However, the reason for abandoning the project is not that the city authorities have changed their minds in five years. It's just that the power itself has managed to change during this time, and the new leadership of Elk Grove's architecture seems to be too phantasmagoric, constructively complex and, most importantly, excessively expensive.
A. M.
