Good Causes: Zaha Hadid Tapped to Help Design Ronald McDonald House

Thursday, January 23, 2014, by Lily di Costanzo

Rendering via Design Boom

Taking a brief pause from the glamorous world of superyachts, galleries, and Olympic stadiums, Zaha Hadid recently lent her dramatic, swooping touch to the new Ronald McDonald House in Hamburg, Germany, designing apartments to be used by families of children undergoing medical treatment at the nearby Altona Children's Hospital. As with past Ronald McDonald House branches, a myriad of architecture and design teams from around the globe were invited to participate in the realization of the new building. Still, Hadid's contribution manages to stand out from the rest thanks to its utterly cool, quite alien-esque design—rendering the proposed units pretty much as far from a dull, hospital-like setting as possible.

The starchitect's compact apartment design measures in at about 270 square feet, with parquet wood floors and matching wood paneling lining the bottom half of the room, and—no surprises here—undulating white walls and ceilings making up the top half the space. Floating beds, desks, and storage units are built right into the walls to make the most of floor space, as are concealed strips of lighting—which are meant to provide ambience, but also inadvertently add to the already space station-like feel. The completed abode will open in the summer of 2014, but until then do head over to Design Boom to see more of Zaha's work, plus the floorplans from such architecture teams as GRAFT and Manuelle Gautrand.

Rendering via Design Boom

Rendering via Design Boom

· Zaha Hadid among architects to design interior of Ronald McDonald House in Hamburg-Altona [Design Boom]
· How 26 Designers Enlivened a Ronald McDonald House [Curbed National]
· All Zaha Hadid coverage [Curbed National]

View the original article here