After designing a wine bottle, Christmas tree, and countless other things that are not buildings, starchitect Zaha Hadid has decided to take her signature style of curvy, unearthly forms to roadside billboards. Commissioned by outdoor advertising company JCDecaux, Hadid recently unveiled the structure that would "create a new genre in the roadside advertising canon," with the revolutionary Zaha! idea being that the familiar rectangular ad screen would now assume a twisty shape, dressed up in bands of thick sheet metal.
Designed for a busy street in the west London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the eye-catching structure wants to spice up a neighborhood that Hadid's firm says "is currently uninspiring and suffering from an overall sense of neglect and dearth of identity." But one commenter on Dezeen gripes that to start with, the billboard could have tried to give more back to the public by morphing into a seating bench or bus stop. Those grand wishes probably won't come true, but the design, which will be reviewed by the local planning committee in January, does offer a strip of lighting on the back for pedestrians and the screens will also display safety messages, travel updates, and artwork.
· Zaha Hadid attempts to rethink roadside advertising with billboard design [Dezeen]
· All Zaha Hadid coverage [Dezeen]