Hadid, Zaha

Zaha Hadid was born in Bagdad and graduated in Mathematics from the American University in Beirut. She then moved to London, where she studied architecture at the Architectural Association and obtained her degree in 1977.
Her work is a revolutionary research bordering on town planning, architecture and design. Her innovative way of representing the project overturns the way we examine space, revealing new potentialities; it bestows on traditional elements of construction unforeseen communicative capabilities; it gives shapes new strength and dynamism. Her interest lies in the boundaries between geography, architecture and landscape, and her projects integrate natural topography and human-built structures, through a project path that capitalises experimental technologies. The lines of Hadid’s architecture are oblique, broken and elusive, the angles are mostly acute, the surfaces smooth; volumes are fractured and recomposed according to new orders, which stem from her efforts to create fluid spaces.
Hadid began her own practice in London in 1979. In 1986, she won the competition for the Kurfurstendamm in Berlin and, in 1989 the one for an arts and communication centre in Düsseldorf (1989). Among her completed projects, besides the MAXXI in Rome (1999/2010), are: the Fire Station of the Vitra Museum (1991/1993); the LF One Pavilion in Weil am Rhein, in Germany; the enlargement of the Ordrupgaard Museum in Copenhagen (2001/2005); the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Arts in Cincinnati (1998/2003); the Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg. She has been especially active in Italy: among her most recent projects are the Salerno Maritime Terminal (2000), the master plan and City Life Tower for Milan’s Trade Fair (2004) and the Messner Mountain Museum in Plan de Corones. These are only a few of the projects Hadid has completed in her intense career, projects that can be analysed through three concepts: metaphor, as in the translation into architectural space of elements of the Information and Technology Age; space itself, generated by the same principles that model natural environment; and the idea of landscape, which is modelled by digital design to give life to complex, unusual and sometimes paradoxical images.
Among her many awards, Hadid was the first woman architect to win the Pritzker Prize in 2004.

ITALIAN PROJECTS

The special relationship between Zaha Hadid and our country is unquestionably linked to her ability to build images of outstanding power and elegance, which foreshadow the future but at the same time manage to converse with the existing. Her Italian projects also play a decisive role in the evolution of Hadid’s formal and representative language, and constitute some significant junctures in the development of her design thinking.

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MAXXI MUSEO NAZIONALE DELLE ARTI DEL XXI SECOLO
Rome, 1998 – 2009

SALERNO MARITIME TERMINAL
Salerno, 2000 – 2016

MESSNER MOUNTAIN MUSEUM CORONES
Plan de Corones, 2012 – 2015

TRAIN STATION NAPLES-AFRAGOLA
Naples, 2003 – 2017

GENERALI TOWER AND CITYLIFE HOUSING COMPLEX
Milan, 2004 – 2017

JESOLOMAGICA RETAIL CENTRE AND HOTEL AND BUSINESS CENTRE
Jesolo, 2009

MUSEO REGIONALE DELL’ARTE NURAGICA E DELL’ARTE CONTEMPORANEA DEL MEDITERRANEO
Cagliari, 2006

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BEYOND BORDERS

A selection of international projects outlines the evolution of Zaha Hadid’s work, from the early years to the present. Starting from the early paintings, evidently inspired by Russian Constructivism, the compositional articulations of the 1980s constitute an instrument of research into and the exploration of new spatiality. Not a representative whim, but a fully-fledged working method.

DESIGN

Zaha Hadid’s work in the field of design shows how she substantially remained first and foremost an architect even when she designed objects and interior decor going from one scale to another with the same aptitude for formal and material experimentation, Her relationship with the Italian productive and creative world was no doubt of crucial importance from this perspective, from the beginning: her first analyses and experiments in the discipline involved Italian companies; in time a rapport of exchange and trust in perfect equilibrium between the architect and the manufacturers was created.