Zaha hadid architects

Zaha hadid architecture style name

First woman to break the glass ceiling of the "Starchitect" universe, dwelling amongst greats such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier , Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid's pioneering vision challenged notions of what could be achieved in building. Coined the "Queen of the Curve," her highly inventive designs liberated architecture from its traditional treatment of concrete and steel and introduced radical new ways to envision spaces in synchronicity with their surroundings.

With a foundation in painting and the utilization of progressive digital technologies, Hadid's creativity was unbound by existing typologies and her innovative approach helped shift the geometry of buildings toward a radical new aesthetic. This painting was made in the early years of Hadid's career as an architect, before any of her designs had been constructed.

It shows her un-built yet competition-winning design for a private leisure club - The Peak - on a mountainside in Hong Kong. The painting emphasizes the sympathetic relationship between the jagged edges of the leisure center and those of the mountain, and positions the building within the topography of the site. The flat surface of the painting acts to remove any boundary between building and landscape - a distinction that Hadid remained interested in blurring throughout her career.

Inspired by the Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich's abstract geometric paintings, the piece explores Hadid's three-dimensional subject matter in this two-dimensional work, demonstrating her interest in spatial relationships. The architect spoke of how Malevich's paintings helped her to use abstraction as a way of investigating different designs.

Zaha hadid education

According to the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, "Her buildings may be made of metal, glass and concrete, but their building blocks are her sketches, drawings and paintings. She described The Peak in this painting as dissolving into a "confetti snowstorm. Rather, the elements of the building are suspended in the landscape as if extending or exploding from it.

According to Obrist, the painting has "the idea of zero gravity, a kind of floating - that is the incredible thing she achieves. Here, her drawings and paintings were shown as artworks in their own right. The Vitra Fire Station was Hadid's first built work, though she had already made her name as a "paper architect" on account of her creative and ambitious architectural drawings.

The client was Rolf Fehlbaum of the Swiss furniture firm Vitra, who would become a member of the jury for the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in the year it was won by Hadid. In , Fehlbaum had commissioned Frank Gehry to build a design museum at the Vitra factory in Weil am Rhein, the first of several buildings by notable architects that now make up the Vitra campus.