BY OWEN FINDSEN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
![[cac]](/editions/1998/11/17/cac_180x143.jpg)
A photomontage of the new Contemporary Arts Center shows how it will look on the corner of Sixth and Walnut Streets downtown.
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It floats by day and glows at night. It's the Contemporary Arts Center's (CAC) new $27.5 million home, proposed for the northwest corner of Sixth and Walnut streets.
London architect Zaha Hadid unveiled her model for the CAC at a Monday morning press conference and a sold-out evening presentation at the Aronoff Center's 440-seat Jarson-Kaplan Theater. The model will be displayed at the CAC, 115 E. Fifth St., beginning Thursday. The architect's design is an ambitious concept to create an entirely new use of space.
"The question is how can one release spaces which were never possible in an urban condition?" Ms. Hadid said.
The plans and model show a stack of rectangular units suspended above a transparent lobby.
"This reverses the usual order of things - heavy on bottom, light on top," Ms. Hadid said. "This will be heavy on top, light on the bottom."
![[hadid]](/editions/1998/11/17/hadid_180x133.jpg)
London architect Zaha Hadid loks at the model unveiled here Monday.
(Glenn Hartong photo)
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The six-level building will have a 142-foot front on Sixth Street, replacing three buildings. The 70-foot frontage on Walnut will reach to the Metropole Apartments. With ceilings as high as 28 feet in galleries and lobbies, the 124-foot high building will be taller than the 11-story Metropole.
A conventional building, built as a cube, would be too massive on the site, Ms. Hadid explained. "It is not one large, solid mass. You have to break it up into segments."
By making the lobby area transparent and dividing the upper floors into rectangular blocks, some transparent and some solid, the building is intended to appear weightless. The blocks will be cantilevered at various angles from a central supporting wall. Some of the blocks will extend out as much as 8 feet over the sidewalk.
"The trick is how to achieve lightness with heavy materials," she said.
Ms. Hadid's concept is to make the building inviting from the outside.
"It is not just a building. It is really a room in the city," she said.
She talked about the "urban carpet" where the lobby inside appears to be part of the outside environment.
Visitors enter on a ramp that leads through a notch in the glass wall on Sixth Street and raises the floor 4 feet above street level. "You can walk inside, go to the museum store, all the way to the back wall without having to buy a ticket," she said.
The lobby is elevated to create a lower mezzanine with a cafe whose upper half is visible from the street.
"There are a lot of cuts in the floor plan that allow you to look down and up through the building," she said.
Although it is a six-story building, the fragmented floor plans allows for 10 levels of floors and mezzanines.
"It is like a jigsaw puzzle of interlocking spaces, with galleries and offices nesting into each other," she said.
A zigzag stairway that appears to be suspended in space leads up through the gallery levels to the top level, intended as an educational center called the "Unmuseum."
"Going through the building should be like going on a journey, like going into a landscape, where there are different levels, different things to see all the time."
Gallery spaces on the upper floors will have solid walls while office spaces will have glass walls. The patterns of transparent and opaque will be particularly dramatic when the building interior is lit at night.
"With lights, it will not be just a building. It will be an event," Ms. Hadid said.
Construction could begin next year and be completed in 2001. It will be the first freestanding art museum built in Cincinnati since 1881.
![[cac]](/editions/1998/11/17/cac_600x476.jpg)
![[hadid]](/editions/1998/11/17/hadid_600x444.jpg)