ZHA: continuity through joints
Nordpark’s roof shells hold a formal family together across different sites. Their continuity raises questions at the scale of the joint.
ZHA’s account of the Nordpark Cable Railway Stations describes four stations responding to different terrain, altitudes and movements. Lightweight roof shells and concrete plinths give them a shared language. Track inclination and the proportions of the stations enter that relationship, while CNC milling and thermoforming connect digital geometry to production.
What interests us is how a recognisable family changes with its location. A repeated surface would be a weak answer if each station asked people to arrive, wait and move in a different way. Formal continuity becomes an architectural question when those differences remain legible.
The surface makes a promise
From a distance, a continuous roof gathers the station into one gesture. Closer in, its edge must end, its underside must meet a support and its profile must establish a relationship with the ground. Each of those decisions can strengthen or interrupt the continuity we first recognised.
A smooth model can leave panel boundaries, thickness and assembly access unresolved. Drawing a joint may change the profile of the shell; changing that profile may change the space below it. The detail returns a question to the larger form.
Read the same edge at two scales
- At the station
- Follow the arrival route and the extent of the public space. Ask what the edge shelters, frames or makes difficult to enter.
- At the joint
- Draw thickness, connection and access for assembly or maintenance. Ask whether the intended profile can survive those requirements.
Computation meets a construction system
KnitCandela brings the construction system into this relationship. ZHA credits its computation and design research group, ZHCODE, with the architectural design. ETH Zurich’s Block Research Group introduced KnitCrete and developed the structural design and construction system, while Architecture Extrapolated (R-Ex) managed execution in Mexico City. A knitted formwork supported the double-curved concrete shell.
We read the collaboration as an invitation to consider geometry alongside the material and the means of making it. The construction system shapes which formal possibilities become workable; it belongs in the design argument from the beginning.
A prototype should return a question
In a small study of a curved edge, we would place the overall section beside a connection detail and a material sample. A wider joint or an added support would then prompt another look at the station-scale drawing: does the edge still define the space we intended, and does the variation still belong to the same formal family?
That exchange between scales is the useful reference for our own work. Nordpark and KnitCandela provide built examples to read. The proposed edge study is our interpretation of the questions they open.