The first woman to win the Pritzker Prize for Architecture in its 26 year history, Zaha Hadid (1950-) has defined a new approach to architecture. Her work experiments with spatial quality, extending and intensifying existing landscapes in the pursuit of a visionary aesthetic that encompasses all fields of design, ranging from urban scale through to products, interiors and furniture.
Hadid shatters both the classically formal, rule bound modernism of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier and the old rules of space — walls, ceilings, front and back, right angles. She then reassembles them as what she calls “a new fluid, kind of spatiality” of multiple perspective points and fragmented geometry, designed to embody the chaotic fluidity of modern life.
Hadid’s architecture denies its own solidity. Short of creating actual forms that morph and change shape – still the stuff of science fiction – Hadid creates the solid apparatus to make us perceive space as if it morphs and changes as we pass through.
Building her projects would have been impossible without the advent of computer-aided design, much like Frank Gehry's later works. Hadid was picked as part of the seminal Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the first definitive survey of the new generation. Critics loved it, but most MoMA visitors found the new shapes, particularly Hadid’s, baffling. She presented her ideas in impressionistic, abstract paintings, designed to get across the feel of her spaces. It took time, though, for people to understand them. Now, finally, she's hot.
Projects to see if you want to know more about her: Vitra Fire Station, at Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1991 to 1993, the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, 2001-2003, and the BMW plant in Leipzig's Central Building.
