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The ingenious work of the most famous woman architect.
Zaha Hadid is an outstanding architect of our time. In 2004, she became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize (an analogue of the Nobel Prize among architects).
The buildings designed by her bureau cannot be confused with anything else. Erected in different parts of the globe, they remain aliens everywhere, building contact with the environment in different ways.
In memory of the greatest architect website collected for you her best projects.
Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku, Azerbaijan
Built in 2013, the Heydar Aliyev Center is a modern cultural center that has become a new symbol of Baku and all of Azerbaijan. It is a complex structure that includes an auditorium, a museum, a concert hall, exhibition halls and administrative offices.
Riverside Transport Museum in Glasgow
The Riverside Transport Museum in Glasgow is an ongoing project. Initially, the museum was planned to open in 2009, but construction was suspended due to the crisis, and 7 years passed from the beginning of the laying to the opening. But it was worth it.
Football Stadium 2022, Qatar
The stadium in the port city of Al Wakrah will be part of a massive 585,000 sq. m. Its capacity is 40,000 spectators, while the upper tier of the stadium will be removable, which will reduce the capacity by half after the end of the championship.
Golden metro station in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
But in the capital of Saudi Arabia will build a metro station of gold. According to Zaha, while working on the project, she was inspired by the dunes of Saudi Arabia, the smooth contours of which she tried to give to the station itself. They will also use a new passenger pass system, which should help avoid crowding during peak hours.
Beko Masterplan multipurpose complex in Belgrade, Serbia
The complex of apartments, offices and recreational spaces, located on the abandoned territory of an old textile factory, is destined to become a new iconic object of Belgrade. In addition to the programs listed above, the proposed complex also includes a five-star hotel, congress center, galleries and shops, as well as underground parking for guests and residents of the city.
Residential building in Manhattan, USA
The house in Manhattan will be in the shape of the letter L, and its inner corner will be built in a zigzag pattern that will delimit the two parts of the building. On the 11th floor there will be 37 apartments with an area of up to 510 square meters and a ceiling height of more than 3 meters. The house will also include a spa, garden and indoor pool.
Polytechnic University in Hong Kong, China
The new university is intended to become an architectural landmark. It will be a complex of educational and research laboratories. The seamless architecture of the building symbolizes the dynamics of the development of present and future achievements and produces an impressive visual effect.
Beethoven Festival Complex Bonn 2020, Germany
The studio took on the improvement of the existing building by the German architect Siegfried Wolske. Hadid's work contains two transparent facades facing the river. It is planned to build terraces around the building, where outdoor performances will be held.
40-storey hotel in Macau, China
The building consists of two towers connected at the level of the podium and the roof, with several additional bridges in the middle. The hotel with a total area of 150,000 square meters consists of 780 rooms, suites and penthouses, conference halls, gambling halls, lobby, restaurants, spa and outdoor pool. You can admire the view of Macau from the tower from the panoramic elevators. Construction of the hotel began in 2013 and is scheduled to open in early 2017.
Changsha International Art and Culture Center, China
An ensemble of "big theatre", a museum of modern art and a "small theater" (multifunctional hall) will appear on the shores of Lake Meixihu in Changsha. Three volumes will be located on a spacious "plaza", which will be complemented by a recessed "courtyard" with restaurants and shops.
The modern architecture of the world amazes with its extraordinary beauty, which is sometimes embodied in the most incredible forms. One such striking example of the "architecture of the future" is the direction of deconstructivism and the projects of the architect Zaha Hadid. Be In Trend chose 9 of Hadid's most striking architectural projects.
Zaha Hadid is a world-famous British architect of Arab origin today, who adheres to the direction of deconstructivism in her projects. This direction in modern architecture is characterized by visual complexity, unexpected broken and deliberately destructive forms, as well as an aggressive intrusion into the urban environment. Prominent representatives of the direction of deconstructivism, formed in the late 1980s, are Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas. In turn, Zaha Hadid is a student of the famous Dutch architect and deconstructivist theorist Rem Koolhaas - having started her career in the office of her teacher OMA, in 1980 she founded her own architectural firm Zaha Hadid Architects.
Also in 2004, Zaha Hadid became the first female architect in history to be awarded the Pritzker Prize.
2012 - Galaxy Soho complex in Beijing (China)
More recently, Zaha Hadid Architects completed a project for a new multifunctional center in Beijing. The architecture of the complex consists of five continuous volumes, which, flowing into each other, form a single space Galaxy Soho. When designing the building, the designers were inspired by the architecture of ancient Chinese courtyards, trying to combine this with the needs of the rapidly developing modern Beijing. The building looks quite futuristic.
2012 - Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center in Baku (Azerbaijan)
The Cultural Center in Baku named after the 3rd President of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev is a complex building that includes a congress center, a museum, exhibition halls and administrative offices. This center, like the building itself, is considered one of the symbols of modern Baku.
2012 - building in Montpellier (France)
In the French city of Montpellier, a spectacular administrative building Pierresvives appeared, which houses the library, archive and sports department of the Hérault department - the capital of Montpellier. As conceived by Hadid, the building looks like a horizontally branching tree.
2011 — Transport Museum in Glasgow (Scotland)
Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, the Transport Museum in Glasgow, Scotland is one of the newest and most modern cultural buildings in the city.
2010 - Guangzhou Opera House (China)
In 2011, an opera house designed by Hadid opened in the Chinese city of Guangzhou. The structure of the building is distinguished by the broken lines of the interior and exterior of the theater, which express the overall concept of Zaha Hadid in the style of "fluidity" and "transfusion".
2011 - Roca Gallery in London
The Roca Gallery in London was built for the Spanish bathroom brand Roca. The structure of the building is characterized by smooth and streamlined shapes, smooth surfaces and no corners. Hadid was inspired to make this choice by the beauty of natural lines in nature, where there are no sharp corners.
2010 - Brixton Academy (UK)
In 2010, the architectural studio Zaha Hadid implemented the project of the Evelyn Grace Academy school in Brixton (south London). The complex consists of four small schools, which are built in a zigzag pattern in harmony with running tracks and sports fields. 
2009 - National Museum of Art of the 21st century in Rome
In 1998, a competition was held to design the building of the National Museum of Art of the 21st Century in Rome, and Zaha Hadid's architectural firm won the competition. In 2009, a building appeared in Rome. It is the largest structure she has designed to date. The construction of a spiral concrete building with an area of 27 thousand square meters lasted 11 years.
1994 - Vitra fire station in Weil am Rhein (Germany)
Architectural design is not only the prerogative of men. In 2004, Zaha Hadid received the Pritzker Prize, becoming the first woman to receive it.
The Pritzker Prize is an award given annually for achievements in the field of architecture. (considered the Nobel Prize for Architecture).
At the time of receiving the award, Zaha was able to bring to life no more than five modest structures, but ten years later, the firm that Zaha Hadid organized in 1980 - Zaha Hadid Architects created 950 projects in 44 countries around the world. At the moment, 400 architects of 55 nationalities work in the state.
Hadid did not have a complicated biography. She was born in 1950 in Iraq to a wealthy and pro-European industrialist. She lived in one of the first modernist houses in Baghdad, which became for her a symbol of progressive views and gave birth to a love of architecture. After school, she left to study mathematics in Beirut, from there to London, and almost never returned to her homeland. In the UK, she entered an architectural school, where the great Dutchman Rem Koolhaas became her mentor. Like a teacher, she adored the Russian avant-garde: her 1977 diploma project of a bridge hotel over the Thames is one big reference to Malevich. Hadid was so gifted that Koolhaas called her "a planet in its own orbit", and immediately after graduating from school he took a partner in the OMA bureau. After three years, she will leave to start her own practice.
Hadid won her first contest in Hong Kong in 1982. with the project of a sports club on top of one of the local mountains. Her proposal, a gravity-defying Suprematist composition, brought Hadid fame among the experts. It could have launched her career, but this did not happen: the club was not built, only beautiful axonometries remained from the project. Paradoxically, the reason was not the technical difficulties or radicalism of the project, but the discussion that had begun on the upcoming transfer of the city from Great Britain to China. The risks of losing Hong Kong's freedom were so strong that a year later the customer chose to cancel the construction. Hadid returned to London and, with the money raised from the competition, opened an office and began working in the "desk".
She built the first building only ten years later, in 1993 - a small fire station for the furniture company Vitra, which, with its flying canopy-wing, could well pass for the pavilion of the work of the Soviet avant-garde artists of the 1920s. A couple of years later, she won the competition three times to create an opera in Cardiff, but it was not built. Before receiving Pritzker, Hadid did have one serious work at all - completed a year before the award, the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in provincial Cincinnati, called, however, the most important new building in the United States since the end of the Cold War.
In the summer of 2014, Zaha Hadid looked triumphant when she opened her new building in Hong Kong. Sandwiched between the highway overpasses and the faceless high-rise buildings of southern Kowloon, the local university of technology's curved aluminum Innovation Tower would seem alien in any setting. Either a rock washed by the sea, or a spaceship that would fit the jockeys from Ridley Scott's Prometheus - its buildings look like cutting-edge technological products, big gadgets, pieces of a future perfectly calculated on a computer, suddenly found themselves on an imperfect planet. But this was not the reason for the triumph - not the building, but the city itself. Two-thirds of her career, Zaha Hadid was a paper architect, popular only among critics. The culprit behind its delayed success is Hong Kong.
In hindsight, it may seem that Zaha Hadid's award was a political decision by the Pritzker jury. Imagine: an avant-garde artist with unlimited imagination, a woman in a male profession (not the only one - in the mid-1990s the Frenchwoman Odile Decq had already achieved fame - but what's the difference), besides, she comes from a third world country. But, rather, the award was issued in advance - with the hope that it will rethink the language of modern architecture. Since 1997, when Frank Gehry opened the deconstructivist Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the world has been swept by the fashion for the world's superstar architects who have become heroes of popular culture. Hadid was supposed to be the most distinctive of them all.
And she did: in 2010 and 2011, she won the prestigious British Sterling Prize twice in a row for the buildings of the National Museum of 21st Century Art in Rome and the Evelyn Grace High School in London. Located in the north of Rome, the MAXXI museum is Hadid's opus magnum, to which she went for three decades. Now Hadid no longer cares about deconstructivism: since the mid-2000s, her buildings have flowing forms, and their design is calculated on a computer like a complex equation that connects all parts of the building. The latter is the responsibility of co-author Hadid and director of her bureau Patrick Schumacher, who is the main theorist of parametric architecture. Working at the table, they waited for technology to bring their imaginations to life, and here it is.
The insides of MAXXI are either the intestines of a strange animal, or the bed of an underground river that washes its way through the thickness of reinforced concrete. If the modernist architecture of the 20th century aspired to the sky and was distinctly airy, then the architecture Hadid- "water", she lives in a world without gravity, and her conditional spaces without a floor and a ceiling flow into each other. There is something oriental in this, as if Hadid recalls his native culture and draws designs like Arabic calligraphy. Is it original? Highly. The problem is that, having become mass, this architecture becomes predictable in its unusualness. She is so unusual and so alien to a European that she always looks like one person, as if Hadid comes up with the same thing over and over again. Moreover, it turns out that this original architecture is not so difficult to copy: in China, the British have already got pirates.
Having won the competition in 2007 in Azerbaijan, Zaha Hadid Architects designed the Heydar Aliyev Center. After gaining independence in 1991, Baku strives to get away from the architecture of the Soviet heritage with all its might. Built in 2012, the center is designed to express the feelings of Azerbaijani culture and show the optimism of a nation that looks to the future with hope.
Accusations of self-repetitions are not the worst thing. Having gone from paper to mass architect, Zaha Hadid found herself in a trap: she became a fashionable superstar architect at the same time that the fashion for such stars began to fade. It turned out that the Bilbao effect does not work; after the recession of 2008, leftism, thrift and social approach are in vogue. Hadid's buildings are the exact opposite: in 2014, she was scolded for the fact that the space in her buildings is used inefficiently, that her work is expensive to build and even more expensive to maintain, that she builds everywhere, especially in China and the oil despotisms of the Middle East, where human rights.
She is blamed for the deaths of workers building a vagina-like stadium in Qatar. In response, Hadid and Schumacher argue that an architect should not think about social justice, he should do his job well. They say that their unusual spaces are changing communication between people and that thanks to these buildings, society will become more progressive and more humane in the future. They are not exactly believed, but the Pritzker jury, as if in jest, gives a new prize to a Japanese who builds temporary cardboard houses for refugees and earthquake victims.
However, Hadid herself is not to blame for this. Throughout the past century, avant-garde architects have been selling not buildings, but hope for progress and memories of a brighter future. But technological progress does not guarantee social justice, and at the beginning of the 21st century, humanity experienced a crisis of faith. No one flew to explore distant planets, there is no unexpected future - there is only a slightly greener and more efficient present with advanced gadgets. All her life, Zaha Hadid has been an avant-garde architect, but now she has nothing more to sell. In 2014, her unusual buildings are just buildings.
Little is known about the personal life and views of Zaha Hadid. She has a complex character, she can be emotional and impatient, but you can hardly refuse her charm. She promised never to build prisons - "even if they are the most luxurious prisons in the world." Due to her career, she never married. She does not have kids. She says that she would like them, but, apparently, already in another life. Hadid calls herself a Muslim, but not that she believes in God. She does not consider herself a feminist, but she is glad that her example has inspired many people around the world. She is sure that women are smart and strong.
Zaha Hadid's apartment is located near an office in London's Clerkenwell, and judging by what people who have been there say, it is a surgically clean space filled with avant-garde furniture. White, faceless and soulless - not so much a house as a temporary and uninhabited haven. Hadid drives a BMW, loves Comme des Garçons, occasionally watches Mad Men, checks his phone too often. She has no personal life - she has projects. In 2014, Zaha Hadid was shortlisted for the sixth time for the Sterling Award for Aquatics Center. built for the 2012 London Olympics.
Despite the criticism in the press, next year she will open five more iconic buildings in different parts of the world, and five more in a year, and she will almost certainly be nominated for the seventh, eighth and millionth time. Now Hadid is 65 years old, her partner Patrick Schumacher is only 53, almost nothing by the standards of the industry. Their bureau is loaded with work for a decade ahead. There is no bright future, but they still have ahead.
In 2015, Zaha Hadid is included in the list of 100 most influential figures in Europe at number 59.
Zaha Hadid died on March 31, 2016 in Miami. She was 65 years old, and many say that for an architect this is a very early death. Hadid began to bring her projects to life late, but immediately received the status of one of the main architects of our time. Her projects stray from the history of architecture: they cling to the history of modern and contemporary art and at the same time pretend that no history of art ever existed. The Village tells what Zaha Hadid's work consisted of and why her work will live on.
Studying with Rem Koolhaas
Born in Baghdad to a wealthy family, Zaha Hadid traveled abroad as a child, studying at the American University of Beirut and then went to study architecture in London, where she met Rem Koolhaas. After working for his OMA office in Rotterdam from 1977 to 1980, she returned to London where she began an independent practice. OMA's interdisciplinary approach clearly influenced Hadid, who incorporated concepts from the visual arts and the natural sciences into her practice. The constant theorizing that Koolhaas did was also important for Hadid, for whom the recognition of her ideas in the early years of work replaced the implementation of projects.
Work in the table
If you look at the list of Zaha Hadid's projects, the first thing that catches your eye is the almost complete absence of completed projects in the 1980s. At the same time, there are many projects left in the form of visualizations and drawings - for different cities and different scales. Her projects won international competitions, but remained on paper because they were too bold - both technologically and contextually. The first building designed by Hadid began to be built only in 1986 in Berlin. She was helped in this by German feminists who were trying to increase the presence of women in modern German architecture. The IBA residential building was completed in Berlin in 1993.
architectural graphics
Fame in architectural circles came to Hadid long before the implementation of the first project. In the early 1980s, she won a competition for the development of Victoria Peak in Hong Kong. This was largely due to the graphic work of Hadid, whose drawings simultaneously conveyed the concept of her architectural project, and could work as completely independent works of fine art. Picturesque renderings of her projects can be viewed on the Zaha Hadid Architects website.
Architect as artist
In general, Hadid's whole approach to architecture and design can be called artistic. Hadid rejected both modernist functionalism and postmodern irony. Her projects seemed to emerge from some parallel world with its own history of art. Her own fantasy was most important to her, but because of this, she was criticized. Thus, the project of the MAXXI Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome was considered completely unsuitable for exhibiting paintings and objects, so that in many ways it became a monument to itself, and its architecture is remembered better than its collection. Her design objects - from furniture to vases to shoes - look like miniature copies of her buildings, and it doesn't matter how comfortable they are to use.
Russian avant-garde
Hadid often said that the Russian avant-garde, especially in the person of Kazimir Malevich, had a strong influence on her work - both as an artist and as an architect. Many of her paintings are reminiscent of his Suprematist compositions, and the title contains the word "tectonics", which is important for constructivists. If you place one of her first projects, the Vitra fire station, next to, say, Konstantin Melnikov's Rusakov club, Hadid's connection to the avant-garde ideas lost in Russia becomes obvious - although not without irony.
Parametricism and composite plastics
Zaha Hadid's bureau subsequently moved from a manual approach to a parametric one, that is, a computational one, in which large amounts of data are processed, on the basis of which the structure of a building is then formed so complex that it can often be difficult to perceive by the human brain. It is thanks to this approach that Zaha Hadid became known as the author of projects of bizarre forms - like the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku. But their implementation would not have been possible without the use of composite plastics, whose properties make it possible to build buildings of non-standard shapes.
Women's
Zaha Hadid is, in fact, the only female star architect, the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize. It would seem that she could serve as a role model for many women who want to make a career in the world of architecture, but her life seemed to be built on a kind of male model. Although she was helped by feminists at the first stage of her career, Hadid herself did not do much for the movement for the emancipation of women. Even if you look at the list of employees of her bureau, there are significantly more male names than female ones. Especially in the higher echelons.
Scandals in Asia
The last years of Hadid's life were marked by scandals related to the construction of sports facilities in Asia. During the construction of her stadium in Qatar, workers died - and the media, of course, paid attention first of all to the famous architect. Hadid asked journalists to check the facts more carefully: the design of the building itself was not dangerous for workers, and the fault lay with the Qatari authorities and the developer, who did not ensure proper safety at the facility. In addition, the stadium project in Qatar was criticized for its extravagant form: for many it resembled a vagina. Although Hadid denied any resemblance, this seems to be more of a plus: this is how the Islamic ban on the image of human faces was ironically beaten in the design of the stadium. Another scandal awaited Zaha Hadid in Tokyo: local architects were horrified by her grandiose project of the Olympic stadium for several billion dollars. Someone compared it to a turtle that wants to drag Japan to the bottom of the sea.
Patrick Schumacher
Patrick Schumacher is a partner at Zaha Hadid Architects who has worked with Hadid on key studio projects since 1988. Senior designer of the bureau, he participated in the development of projects for the Vitra fire station and the MAXXI museum. 28 years of joint work could not be in vain: Schumacher shares the principles of Zaha Hadid and works as a shadow ruler of her bureau. So with the death of Zaha, her work will not die: her ghost will remain with us.
PHOTO: cover - Kevork Djansezian / AP / TASS, 1, 4 - Christian Richters / Zaha Hadid Architects, 2, 3, 6 - Zaha Hadid Architects, 5 - Helene Binet / Zaha Hadid Architects, 7 - Ivan Anisimov
A mansion designed by Zaha Hadid has appeared in the Moscow region, Designboom reports. The customer was businessman Vladislav Doronin, whose development company Capital Group has been cooperating with the famous British architect for several years (Hadid designed the Picturesque Tower residential complex for Capital Group).
A house called Capital Hill Residence in the form of a spaceship was built in the village of Barvikha on Rublevskoye Highway. The mansion is made in eco-style - a mixture of modern technologies with natural forms. The house is located away from neighboring mansions in the middle of a pine forest. Its area is 2650 square meters.
According to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, two 22-meter towers house bedrooms and children's rooms. In the basement there is a Finnish sauna, a hammam, a Russian bath, a fitness room and a guest room. On the ground floor there is a reception hall, an indoor pool, a dining room and a kitchen.
Zaha Hadid is a British architect of Arab origin. She became the first woman in the world to receive the world's most prestigious architectural award, the Pritzker Prize.
According to the assumptions of the press, the house is intended for Doronin's girlfriend, model Naomi Campbell.
Photos: zaha-hadid.com
