Zaha

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 elements that seemed to splinter the structure into its myriad constituent parts, as if it had been subjected to some powerful de–stabilizing force.

Seemingly defiant of gravity, the forms of Hadid’s project hover and float, animated by the same visionary power that marked the ground–breaking Constructivist structures that Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, and Moisei Ginzburg imagined would arise in a new, postrevolutionary Soviet society.

That seeming instability, which can also be found in the works of a number of other architects active in the 1980’s, has been related to the literary movement of deconstruction, whose principal interpreter, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, has become a familiar figure within contemporary debates on architectural theory.

The Museum of Modern Art (GCCDC Edit)