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Elisabetta Buendia
A year after her untimely passing, we take a look back on one of the hallmarks of Zaha Hadid's career as an architect: her sketches. In October we wrote about how her paintings influenced her architecture. Now, we examine her most emblematic sketches and the part they played in the initial formal exploration of her design process.
Drawings, whether done by hand or digitally, are the result of a personal, intimate process of thinking through a project and setting a path for the general development of the design. Possessing different characteristics and intensities, each sketch is a reflection of the author's thoughts--acting as both a kind of signature and the theoretical seed of a larger process. Some architects use sketches to define details and create their design from that starting point, some use the drawing itself to determine the form of a project, and other architects draw the context in order to imagine the specific location of their project.
Zaha's exceptional, unique sketches don't have much to do with concrete visions of what a project will eventually be. On the contrary, her drawings are profoundly influenced by her admiration for artistic abstraction. The beauty lies in the formal liberty that Hadid mines as she approaches what will eventually become her buildings. The drawings depict formal exercises, spatial conceptualizations, compositions, construction systems, structures, or contextual relationships (among other things). They are an invitation to use the liberty gifted to us by the act of drawing.
She was described by The Guardian as the "Queen of Curves",[3] who "liberated architectural geometry, giving it a whole new expressive identity".[4] Her major works include the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics, the Broad Art Museum, Rome's MAXXI Museum, and the Guangzhou Opera House.[5] Some of her awards have been presented posthumously, including the statuette for the 2017 Brit Awards. With several awards and accolades to her name, she has also been recognized by the 2013 Forbes List as one of the "World's Most Powerful Women"[6][7][8] Several of her buildings were still under construction at the time of her death, including the Daxing International Airport in Beijing, and the Al Wakrah Stadium (now Al Janoub) in Qatar, a venue for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.[9][10][11]
Hadid was the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 2004.[12] She received the UK's most prestigious architectural award, the Stirling Prize, in 2010 and 2011. In 2012, she was made a Dame by Elizabeth II for services to architecture, and in February 2016, the month preceding her death,[13] she became the first woman to be individually awarded the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects (Ray Eames and Sheila O'Donnell had previously been awarded it jointly with Charles Eames and John Tuomey respectively).[14][15]
Zaha Hadid was born on 31 October 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq, to an upper-class Iraqi family.[16] Her father, Muhammad al-Hajj Husayn Hadid, was a wealthy industrialist from Mosul. He co-founded the left-liberal al-Ahali group in 1932, a significant political organisation in the 1930s and 1940s.[16] He was the co-founder of the National Democratic Party in Iraq[16] and served as minister of finance after the overthrow of the monarch after the 1958 Iraqi coup d'tat for the government of General Abd al-Karim Qasim. Her mother, Wajiha al-Sabunji, was an artist from Mosul[17] while her brother Foulath Hadid was a writer, accountant and expert on Arab affairs.[18] Hadid once mentioned in an interview how her early childhood trips to the ancient Sumerian cities in southern Iraq sparked her interest in architecture. In the 1960s, Hadid attended boarding schools in England and Switzerland.[19][20][21] Hadid was unmarried with no children.[22]
After graduation in 1977, she went to work for her former professors, Koolhaas and Zenghelis, at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.[24] Through her association with Koolhaas, she met the architectural engineer Peter Rice, who gave her support and encouragement during the early stages of her career.[16][21] Hadid became a naturalised citizen of the United Kingdom.[17][25] She opened her own architectural firm, Zaha Hadid Architects, in London in 1980.[26] During the early 1980s Hadid's style introduced audiences to a new modern architecture style through her extremely detailed and professional sketches. At the time people were focused on postmodernism designs, so her designs were a different approach to architecture that set her apart from other designers.[21]
She then began her career teaching architecture, first at the Architectural Association, then, over the years at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge University, the University of Chicago, the Hochschule fr bildende Knste in Hamburg, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Columbia University. She earned her early reputation with her lecturing and colourful and radical early designs and projects, which were widely published in architectural journals but remained largely unbuilt. Her ambitious but unbuilt projects included a plan for Peak in Hong Kong (1983), and a plan for an opera house in Cardiff, Wales, (1994). The Cardiff experience was particularly discouraging; her design was chosen as the best by the competition jury, but the Millennium Commission, acting as funding body, refused to pay for it, and the commission was given to a different and less ambitious architect.[27] Hadid's response to the decision was to ask "Do they want nothing but mediocrity?".[28] Her reputation in this period rested largely upon her teaching and the imaginative and colourful paintings she made of her proposed buildings. Her international reputation was greatly enhanced in 1988 when she was chosen to show her drawings and paintings as one of seven architects chosen to participate in the exhibition "Deconstructivism in Architecture" curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley at New York's Museum of Modern Art.[5][29] This, a conference at the Tate in London and press coverage of her work began to not only get her name out into the architecture world, but allowed people to associate a particular style of architecture with Hadid.[21]
One of her first clients was Rolf Fehlbaum, the president-director general of the Swiss furniture firm Vitra, and later, from 2004 to 2010, a member of the jury for the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize. In 1989, Fehlbaum had invited Frank Gehry, then little-known, to build a design museum at the Vitra factory in Weil-am-Rhein. In 1993, he invited Hadid to design a small fire station for the factory. Her design, made of raw concrete and glass, was a sculptural work composed of sharp diagonal forms colliding together in the centre. The design plans appeared in architecture magazines before construction. When completed, it only served as a fire station for a short period of time, as Weil am Rhein soon opened their own fire station. It became an exhibit space instead, and is now on display with the works of Gehry and other well-known architects. It was the launching pad of her architectural career.[29]
In 1994, Hadid was commissioned by the city of Vienna to design and construct a three-part scheme for the urban redevelopment of an area adjacent to the Danube Canal.[30] Situated along the Spittelauer Lnde, the series of buildings interact with and cross over the railway viaduct by Viennese Modernist architect Otto Wagner, a protected structure.[31] In its initial design consisting of five buildings, the mixed-use scheme, described as a "sculpture-like overbuilding" of the historic Stadtbahn railway,[32] was designed by Hadid's practice ZHA. Hadid, together with British architectural artist Brian Clarke, developed an unexecuted collaborative proposal for the project that incorporated integral artworks by Clarke as part of the Neo-Futurist structures, with interrelated glass mosaic and traditionally-leaded stained glass forming part of the cladding and fenestration of the complex.[33] Clarke developed a new type of mouth-blown glass for the scheme, which he christened 'Zaha-Glas'.[34] Later reduced to three buildings, the project, which experienced delays in construction, was completed in 2006,[30] without the artwork.
In 2002, she won the competition to design a new administrative building for the factory of the auto manufacturer BMW in Leipzig, Germany. The three assembly buildings adjoining it were designed by other architects; her building served as the entrance and what she called the "nerve centre" of the complex. As with the Phaeno Science Center, the building is hoisted above street level on leaning concrete pylons. The interior contains a series of levels and floors which seem to cascade, sheltered by tilting concrete beams and a roof supported by steel beams in the shape of an 'H'. The open interior inside was intended, she wrote, to avoid "the traditional segregation of working groups" and to show the "global transparence of the internal organisation" of the enterprise, and wrote that she had given particular attention to the parking lot in front of the building, with the intent, she wrote, of "transforming it into a dynamic spectacle of its own".[40]
Between 1997 and 2010, Hadid ventured into the engineers' domain of bridge construction, a field also occupied by other top architects including Norman Foster and Santiago Calatrava. Between 2005 and 2008, she designed and built the Bridge-Pavilion of Zaragoza, which was both an exhibit hall and a bridge, created for Expo 2008, an event on the themes of water and durable development. The concrete bridge span on which the pavilion rests is 85 metres long, as measured from the Exposition site to an island in the Ebro River. The bridge carries or is attached to four tunnel-like exhibition spaces she termed "pods", which spread onto the island, for a total length of 275 metres. The pods are covered with a skin of 26,000 triangular shingles, many of which open to let in air and light. The bridge-pavilion, characteristic of her designs and buildings of the period, is composed entirely of diagonal slopes and curves, with no right-angles of orthogonal forms. By its curving shape and low profile, the bridge-pavilion fits smoothly into the grassy landscape along the river.[43]
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