April 2009
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March 2009
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Malevich's Tektonik 1977
London - United Kingdom
For the graduation project at the Architectural Association, Zaha Hadid explored the ‘mutation’ factor for the programme requirements of a hotel on the Hungerford Bridge over the Thames. The horizontal ‘tektonik’ conforms to and makes use of the apparantly random composition of Suprematist forms to meet the demands of the programme and the site.
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Malevich’s Tektonik 1977
London, United Kingdom - Part I
If we examine the project Malevich’s Tektonik, considering the problematic of the first half of the 1970’s, which we recall as the years in which the historicist influence is strong (The Language of Post-Modernism by Charles Jencks comes out in 1977), we will see that the messages promoted by Hadid are at least four;
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Malevich’s Tektonik 1977
London, United Kingdom - Part II
04. To declare inconsistent every disciplinary division between the arts. If art is a pure sculptural sensibility, it no longer makes sense to speak of painting, sculpture, and architecture as distinct activities because they all contribute to a single goal: the construction of a space in which every difference between figural and...
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Interview with Alvin Boyarsky
October 1987, Part I
The following is excerpted from a series of discussions on the occasion of Zaha Hadid’s 1987 exhibition of furniture at the Architectural Association (AA), England’s oldest school of architecture. Alvin Boyarsky, Chairman of the AA from 1971 to 1990, created a legacy of globalism at the school decades before such ideas as the Internet and multiculturalism were widely...
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Interview with Alvin Boyarsky - Part II
ZH: The question was how to free the plan in a different way than had been done in the past, how to free it to allow certain elements to operate independently. These parts are able to impose themselves more assertively on the urban condition. What may seem to be frivolous graphics has a special logic of its own. It may not be rational in the European sense,...
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Interview with Alvin Boyarsky - Part III
AB: What if we were to take a sequence of sketches – any sequence, six, a dozen, fifteen sketches – lay them out like decks of cards, and discuss the significance?
ZH: The plan develops from a composite of my early sketches. The Peak (Hong Kong, 1982–83), Parc de la Villette (Paris, 1982–83), and the Irish Prime Minister’s Residence were each done...
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Interview with Alvin Boyarsky - Part IV
AB: It’s very interesting that you don’t use the word “space” at all.
ZH: I always think of a given space – I mean “space” in a broad sense, because you can never perceive small spaces. If you use the term “space,” as in public space, you mean a sort of overall concept, like air. You can never perceive the whole only if it’s an open space and not on the...
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Interview with Alvin Boyarsky - Part V
ZH: The ground could be anywhere, but once you establish a ground, you have to operate on it, especially in an urban situation. I think Brasília (for which Niemeyer was chief architect) operates on two levels. The wings of the plane suffer from the nonresolution on the ground. The reason that the central government buildings operate better than the...
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Interview with Alvin Boyarsky - Part VI
ZH: A year later when I was assigned a nightclub as a project, I had a ship literally breaking through a glass wall. After this I returned to Malevich’s Tecktonik with the understanding that the shipwreck had to be done abstractly. I realized that the architecture occurs not only on the level of the tectonic, but also on the levels of the diagrams. So I...
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Interview with Alvin Boyarsky - Part VII
AB: In the pragmatic world you’re describing, architecture becomes applied information, applied allegiances.
ZH: Compare the scenes of 1987 and 1975. Back then, so-called thinkers invested time in experiments. It was a respectable line of enquiry. Today, there is no respect for that.
AB: Shall we go back a little and talk about the tradition of the...
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Interview with Alvin Boyarsky - Part VIII
ZH: I think it’s a great that there are people with energy and there is economic energy, but unfortunately these two things don’t coincide. England operates as a sort of incubator. The AA (Architectural Association) could never have existed anywhere but London, no matter what style it taught or if there was a different chairman, because London is so...
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Interview with Alvin Boyarsky - Part IX
ZH: Of course, the same can said of English architects. They haven’t always given themselves time to develop their sensibilities, so when it’s come time for them to make buildings, they’ve needed an easy way out. They’ve simply gone to the nearest source and appropriated from it. I find that disappointing.
AB: What do you think of the notion of...
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February 2009
35 posts
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Moonsoon Restaurant 1990
Sapporo - Japan
The project is an interior enclosure. The constraints of the conventional building created the desire for Hadid to break away. The restaurant is a hybrid in compression, dynamic inside and static outside.
Design of the restaurant with formal eating and relaxed lounging is stretched between two synthetic and strand worlds of opposite character: fire and ice.
The ground floor in...
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“Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good...”
– Thought Leadership by Design
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The Peak 1983
Kowloon, Hong Kong - China
This project by Hadid was the winning design in a competition for a private club to be located in the hills of Kowloon, overlooking Hong Kong. Hadid proposed a transformation of the site itself by excavating the hills and using the excavated rock to build artificial cliffs.
Into this new topography, she interjected cantilevered beams, shardlike fragments, and other...
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Process of Exploring Through Painting
Zaha Hadid’s paintings are usually acrylic on canvas or cartridge paper. Recently she has begun to use a process of silver painting. Her paintings have transformed over time, from the abstract but simple fluid shapes of Malevich’s Tektonik to the complex detail and contortion of shape, space, and color in more recent works.
Hadid has said that her painting style has been influenced by...
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WatchThe Charlie Rose Interview Show (PBS) 1.6.2006 - Guest host Paul Goldberger talks with architect Zaha Hadid, winner of the 2004 Pritzker Prize about her past works and artistic aspirations.
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WatchThe Charlie Rose Interview Show (PBS) 16.5.2003 - A conversation with Zaha about her career, being the first female recipient of the Pritzker prize and her projects, including her first in the U.S., the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati.
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“I don’t do nice.”
– Guardian 9.10.2006 »
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The Vitra Fire Station 1994
The Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein was Zaha Hadid’s first built project. The relatively small structure serves as a showcase for the unusual shapes and angles that architectural critics had admired in her conceptual work throughout the 1980’s.
As can be expected, the inside of the building is as imaginative as the outside, with multiple optical tricks being played on the viewer...
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“Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?”
– Print in t-shirt giveaways at Hadid’s retrospective in Vienna 2003
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Building Things the World Has Never Seen Before
Qantara.de - Dialogue with the Islamic World (2007)
Having been awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004, Zaha Hadid is currently at the zenith of her success. Melanie Weidemüller met the star architect, artist, and diva at a press conference in London.
Will she come or will she cancel at the last minute? She has already made it clear that she will only stay for half an hour and will give...
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Building Things the World Has Never Seen Before - Part II
The appeal of all this may be limited, but the impressive overview of the world built by Hadid over the past 15 years – a 30-minute video shown at the conference – certainly makes up for it. We see objects, interiors, stage designs, exhibition architecture, railway stations, hotels, museums, and industrial complexes.
This...
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Building Things the World Has Never Seen Before - Part III
Her most famous buildings demonstrate what makes her designs so unique: Hadid builds as if she was reinventing the art of building. The Bergisel ramp near Innsbruck was opened in 2002: this 90-metre long concrete and steel structure stretches up into the sky like an elegant dinosaur neck while the spectacular café and viewing terrace,...
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Building Things the World Has Never Seen Before - Part IV
THE FIRST WOMAN TO WIN PRITZKER PRIZE
Zaha Hadid is currently at the zenith of her success. Her construction projects have reached the dimension of master plans for entire urban residential and industrial complexes. Examples include “One North” in Singapore (currently under construction), “Zorrozaurre” in Bilbao, “Olebeaga” in Spain,...