A whiter shade of grey: as her first major public building in Europe, the Phaeno science centre in Wolfsburg represents a significant moment in the career of Zaha Hadid.

Opening later this month, seven years after the initial competition-winning commission, Zaha Hadid's soon to be completed science centre is set to become part of Wolfsburg's ongoing strategic vision to transform itself from industrial colony to a more culturally diverse service and leisure centre. Despite its robust presence, the triangulated concrete monolith forms a threshold that blurs notional and physical boundaries; programmatically, between museum and hands-on education centre; culturally, between Wolfsburg's technical and cultural heritage; and tectonically between ancient and modern techniques, through its ambitious use of concrete (AR January 2004). What is perhaps surprising, however, when experienced first-hand, is its civic presence. It is much more than an urban marker; more than the iconic object celebrated in computer renderings. As a threshold building it exploits and resolves many physical relationships, challenging established practices and institutional attitudes, most obviously through the proposition to raise the building above a pedestrianised piazza that recalls some of Hadid's unfulfilled public realm aspirations explored at Cardiff Bay. As with Cardiff, despite the public constitution of the resident institution, exhibition spaces will inevitably be controlled and privatised. By elevating the building, however, most of the site will be given over to public realm. Time will tell, therefore, whether or not Hadid's first major contribution to the future morphology of the European city will prove an exemplary model.

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