Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid “ZAHA HADID”

(1950 – 2016)

An Iraqi-British architect born on 31 October 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. Raised by Muhammad al-
Hajj Husayn Hadid (Father), a wealthy industrialist, and Wajiha al-Sabunji (Mother), an artist,
both from Mosul. Zaha Hadid started attending boarding schools in England and Switzerland in
the 1960s. Studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut then later on moved, in
1972, to London to study architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.
Received the PRITZKER ACHITECTURE PRIZE in 2004 and the first woman to do so and also
received the STIRLING PRIZE in 2010 and 2011. In 2015, she became the first and only woman
to be awarded the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects. On 31 March
2016, Hadid died of a heart attack in a Miami hospital, where she was being treated for
bronchitis.
She is dedicated in the MODERNISM movement. She even quoted “For many years, I hated
nature. As a student, I refused to put a plant anywhere – a living plant, that is. Dead plants were
OK.” All of her works in her career are breathtaking and worth recognition and are described in
many ways such as NEO-FUTURISTIC, DECONSTRUCTIVISM, PARAMETRICISM, MULTIPLE-
PERSPECTIVE and FRAGMENTED GEOMETRY.
Here are some of her notable works:

Vitra Fire Station (1991–93)

One of her first clients was Rolf Fehlbaum, the president-director general of the German
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 radical design, made of raw concrete and glass,
was a sculptural work composed of sharp diagonal forms colliding together in the centre. It
appeared in architecture magazines before it was ever constructed. When completed, it never
served as a fire station, as the government requirements for industrial firefighting were
changed. 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.

Bergisel Ski Jump (1999–2002)

Hadid designed a public housing estate in Berlin (1986–1993) and organized an exhibition, "The
Great Utopia" (1992), at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Her next major project was a
ski jump at Bergisel, in Innsbruck Austria. The old ski jump, built in 1926, had been used in the
1964 and 1976 Winter Olympics. The new structure was to contain not only a ski jump, but also
a cafe with 150 seats offering a 360-degree view of the mountains. Hadid had to fight against
traditionalists and against time; the project had to be completed in one year, before the next
international competition. Her design is 48 metres high and rests on a base seven metres by
seven metres. She described it as "an organic hybrid", a cross between a bridge and a tower,
which by its form gives a sense of movement and speed.

Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (1997–2000)

At the end of the 1990s, her career began to gather momentum, as she won commissions for
two museums and a large industrial building. She competed against Rem Koolhaas and other
well-known architects for the design of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio
(1997–2000). She won, and became the first woman to design an art museum in the United
States. At 8,500 square metres, the museum was not huge, and her design did not have the
flamboyance of the Guggenheim Bilbao of Frank Gehry, built at the same time. But the project
demonstrated Hadid's ability to use architectural forms to create interior drama, including its
central element, a 30-metre long black stairway that passes between massive curving and
angular concrete walls.

Phaeno Science Center (2000–2005)

In 2000, she won an international competition for the Phaeno Science Center, in Wolfsburg,
Germany (2002–2005). The new museum was only a little larger than the Cincinnati Museum,
with 9,000 square metres of space, but the plan was much more ambitious. It was similar in
concept to the buildings of Le Corbusier, raised up seven metres on concrete pylons. Unlike
Corbusier's buildings, she planned for the space under the building to be filled with activity, and
each of the 10-massive inverted cone-shaped columns that hold up the building contains a cafe,
a shop, or a museum entrance. The tilting columns reach up through the building and also
support the roof. The museum structure resembles an enormous ship, with sloping walls and
asymmetric scatterings of windows, and the interior, with its angular columns and exposed
steel roof framework, gives the illusion of being inside a working vessel or laboratory.

Ordrupgaard Museum extension (2001–2005)

In 2001, she began another museum project, an extension of the Ordrupgaard Museum in
Copenhagen, Denmark, a museum featuring a collection of 19th century French and Danish art
in the 19th-century mansion of its collector. The new building is 87 metres long and 20 metres
wide, and is connected by a five-metre wide passage to the old museum. There are no right
angles – only diagonals – in the concrete shell of the museum. The floor-to-ceiling glass walls of
the gallery make the garden the backdrop of the exhibits.

BMW Administration Building (2001–2005)

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
organization" 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."
In 2004, she won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the most prestigious award in architecture,
though she had only completed four buildings – including the Vitra Fire Station, the Ski Lift in
Innsbruck Austria, and the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. In making the
announcement, Thomas Pritzker, the head of the jury, announced: "Although her body of work
is relatively small, she has achieved great acclaim and her energy and ideas show even greater
promise for the future."

Zaragoza Bridge Pavilion (2005–2008)

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,
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. Like her other structures, the bridge-pavilion 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.
 Sheik Zayed Bridge (1997–2010)
Between 1997 and 2010 she constructed a much more ambitious bridge, the Sheikh Zayed
Bridge, between the island of Abu-Dhabi and the mainland of Abu-Dhabi, as well as to the
international airport. Both the design of the bridge and the lighting, consisting of gradually
changing colours, were designed to give the impression of movement. The silhouette of the
bridge is a wave, with a principal arch 235 metres long, standing 60 metres above the water.
The total span of four lanes is 842 metres long, and also includes pedestrian walkways.

National Museum of Arts of the 21st Century (MAXXI), Rome, Italy (1998–2010)
The National Museum of Arts of the 21st Century (MAXXI for short), in Rome, was designed and
built between 1998 and 2010. The main theme of its architecture is the sense of movement;
Everything in the structure seems to be moving and flowing. The facade belongs to her earlier
period, with smooth curving white walls and an austere black and white colour scheme. The
building is perched on groups of five very thin pylons, and one gallery with a glass face
precariously overhangs the plaza in front of the museum, creating shade. Rowan Moore of The
Guardian of London described its form as "bending oblong tubes, overlapping, intersecting and
piling over each other. The imagery is of flow and movement and it resembles a demented
piece of transport architecture. Inside, black steel stairs and bridges, their undersides glowing
with white light, fly across a void. They take you off to the galleries, which are themselves
works of frozen motion. The design is intended to generate what Hadid called "confluence,
interference and turbulence"
 Guangzhou Opera House (2003–2010)
In 2002 Hadid won an international competition for her first project in China. The Guangzhou
Opera House is located in a new business district of the city, with a new 103-storey glass tower
behind it. It covers 70,000 square metres and was built at cost of US$300 million. The complex
comprises an 1,800-seat theatre, a multipurpose theatre, entry hall, and salon. A covered
pathway with restaurants and shops separates the two main structures. This building, like
several of her later buildings, was inspired by natural earth forms; the architect herself referred
to it as the "two pebbles". It appears akin to two giant smooth-edged boulders faced with
75,000 panels of polished granite and glass. Edwin Heathcote, writing for the Financial Times,
noted Hadid's concentration on how her design could transform the urban landscape of
Guangzhou, as the building rose as the centre of the new business area. He wrote in 2011 that
Hadid "produced a building that seems to suck the surrounding landscape into a vortex of
movement and swirling space... appears both as alien object in a landscape of
incomprehensible vastness (and often overwhelming banality), and as an extrusion of the
peculiar nature of this landscape." Nicolai Ourousoff, architecture critic of the New York Times,
wrote that "stepping into the main hall is like entering the soft insides of an oyster...The
concave ceiling is pierced by thousands of little lights—it looks like you're sitting under the
dome of a clear night sky." Ourousoff noted that the finished building had construction
problems: many of the granite tiles on the exterior had to be replaced, and the plaster and
other interior work was poorly done by the inexperienced workers, but he praised Hadid's
ability "to convey a sense of bodies in motion" and called the building "a Chinese gem that
elevates its setting."
 Riverside Museum, Glasgow, Scotland (2004–2011)
The Riverside Museum (2004–2011), on the banks of the River Clyde Glasgow, Scotland, houses
the Glasgow Museum of Transport. Hadid described the 10,000-square meter building, with
7,000 square meters of gallery space, as "a wave", "folds in movement", and "a shed in the
form of a tunnel, open at the extreme ends, one end toward the city and the other toward the
Clyde." Like many of her buildings, the whole form is only perceived when viewed from above.
The facades are covered with zinc plates, and the roofline has a series of peaks and angles. The
interior galleries caused some controversy; visitors who came to see the collection of historic
automobiles found that they are mounted on the walls, high overhead, so it is impossible to
look into them. Rowan Moore of The Guardian of London wrote: "Obviously the space is about
movement...Outside it is, typologically, a supermarket, being a big thing in a parking lot that is
seeking to attract you in... It has enigma and majesty, but not friendliness."

London Olympics Aquatics Centre (2005–2011)

Hadid described her Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London as "inspired by
the fluid geometry of water in movement." The building covers three swimming pools, and
seats 17,500 spectators at the two main pools. The roof, made of steel and aluminum and
covered with wood on the inside, rests on just three supports; it is in the form of a parabolic
arch which dips in the centre, with the two pools at either end. The seats are placed in bays
beside the curving and outward-leaning walls of glass. At £269 million, the complex cost three
times the original estimate, owing principally to the complexity of the roof. This was the subject
of much comment when it was constructed, and it was the first 2012 Olympic building begun
but the last to be finished. It was praised by architecture critics. Rowan Moore of The Guardian
said that the roof "floats and undulates" and called the centre "The Olympics' most majestic
space."

Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan (2007–2012)

The Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, Hadid's second
project in the United States, has a space of 4,274 square metres, dedicated to contemporary art
and modern art and an historical collection. The parallelogram-shaped building leans sharply
and seems about to tip over. Hadid wrote that she designed the building so that its sloping
pleated stainless steel facades would reflect the surrounding neighborhood from different
angles; the building continually changes colour depending upon the weather, the time of day
and the angle of the sun. As Hadid commented, the building "awakens curiosity without ever
truly revealing its contents." Elaine Glusac of the New York Times wrote that the architecture of
the new museum "radicalizes the streetscape." The Museum was used in a scene of the 2016
Batman vs. Superman movie.

Galaxy SOHO, Beijing, China (2008–2012)

Many of Hadid's later major works are found in Asia. The Galaxy SOHO in Beijing, China (2008–
2012) is a combination of offices and a commercial centre in the heart of Beijing with a total of
332,857 square metres, composed of four different ovoid glass-capped buildings joined
together by multiple curving passageways on different levels. Hadid explained, "the interior
spaces follow the same coherent formal logic of continual curvilinearity." The complex, like
most of her buildings, gives the impression that every part of them is in motion.

Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku Azerbaijan (2007–2013)

The Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan (2007–2013) is a gigantic cultural and conference
centre containing three auditoriums, a library and museum, with a total space of 10,801 square
metres on a surface of 15,514 square metres, and a height of 74 metres. Hadid wrote that "its
fluid form emerges from the folds of the natural topography of the landscape and envelops the
different functions of the centre," though the building when completed was largely surrounded
by Soviet-era apartment blocks. Peter Cook in Architectural Review called it "a white vision,
outrageously total, arrogantly complete'... a unique object that confounds and contradicts the
reasonable...a wave form sweeping up, almost lunging, into the sky...here is architecture as the
ultimate statement of theatre...It is the most complete realization yet of the Iraqi-born
architect's vision of sweeping curves and flowing space."
Consisting of eight storeys, the centre includes an auditorium with 1000 seats, exhibition space,
conference hall, workshop and a museum. No straight line was used in the project of the
complex. The shape of the building is wave-like and the overall view is unique and harmonic.
Such an architectural structure stands for post-modernist architecture and forms oceanic
feeling. The lines of the building symbolize the merging of past and future.
 Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Seoul, Korea (2007–2013)
The Dongdaemun Design Plaza (2007–2013) is among the largest buildings in Seoul, South
Korea. Its name means "Great Gate of the East", in reference to the old walls of the city. The
complex of 86,574 square metres contains exhibition space, a museum of design, conference
rooms and other common facilities, as well as the bureaux and a marketplace for designers
which is open 24 hours a day. The main building is 280 metres long with seven levels, including
three levels underground. The smooth-skinned, giant mushroom-like structure floating atop
sloping pylons is made of concrete, aluminum, steel and stone on the exterior, and finished
inside with plaster reinforced with synthetic fiber, acoustic tiles, acrylic resin, and stainless steel
and polished stone on the interior. Hadid wrote that the principal characteristics of her design
were "transparency, porousness, and durability." It also features many ecological features,
including a double skin, solar panels, and a system for recycling water.

Library and Learning Center, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria (2008–2013)

The Library and Learning Center was designed as the centerpiece of the new University of
Economics in Vienna. Containing 28,000 square metres of space, its distinctive Hadid features
include walls sloping at 35 degrees and massive black volume cantilevered at an angle over the
plaza in front of the building. She described the interior as follows: "The straight lines of the
building's exterior separate as they move inward, becoming curvilinear and fluid to generate a
free-formed interior canyon that serves as the principal public plaza of the Center, as well as
generating corridors and bridges ensuring smooth transitions between different levels."
 Innovation Tower, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (2007–2014)
The Innovation Tower in Hong Kong (2007–2014) is part of Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
The building of 15 floors has 15,000 square metres of space, with laboratories, classrooms,
studios and other facilities for 1,800 students and their faculty. It was built on the site of the
university's former football pitch. The extremely complex forms of the building required
computer modelling. Early designs experimented with a facade made of reinforced plastic,
textiles or aluminum, but Hadid finally settled upon metal panels with multiple layers. The
building seems to lean towards the city. The floors inside are visible from the exterior like
geological strata.

Wangjing SOHO Tower, Beijing (2009–2014)

Wangjing SOHO tower in Beijing is the second building Hadid designed for the major Chinese
furniture manufacturer, located half-way between the centre of Beijing and the airport. The
towers slope and curve; Hadid compared them to Chinese fans, "whose volumes turn one
around the other in a complex ballet." The tallest building is 200 metres high, with two levels of
shops and 37 levels of offices. A single atrium level three storeys high joins the three buildings
at the base.
 Port Authority, Antwerp, Belgium (2016)
Of all her works, Hadid designed only one government building, offices for the port authority,
or Havenhuis, in Antwerp, Belgium, completed in 2016. Most new government buildings
attempt to express solidity and seriousness but Port Authority, a ship-like structure of glass and
steel on a white concrete perch, seems to have landed atop the old port building constructed in
1922. The faceted glass structure also resembles a diamond, a symbol of Antwerp's role as the
major market of diamonds in Europe. It was one of the last works of Hadid, who died in 2016,
the year it opened.

Salerno Maritime Terminal in Salerno, Italy (2000–2016)

The first major project to be completed shortly after her death was the Salerno Maritime
Terminal in Salerno, Italy, her first major transportation building. She won the competition for
the building in 2000, but then the project was delayed due to funding and technical issues.
Hadid scouted the site from a police boat in the harbor to visualize how it would appear from
the water. The final building covers 50,000 square feet and cost 15 million Euros. Paolo
Cattrarin, the project architect who completed the building after Hadid's death, said, "We
thought of the building as an oyster, with a hard-shell top and bottom, and a softer, liquid,
more organic interior." At the opening of the new building, posters of Hadid were placed
around the city, saying, "Goodbye Zaha Hadid; Genius and Modernity, Inspiration and
Transformation, Light That Takes Shape."
Chosen Project:
Library and Learning Center, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

 Architects:
Zaha Hadid Architects
 Location:
Vienna, Austria
 Client
University of Economics Vienna
 Area
28000.0 m2
 Project Year
2013
 Manufacturers
Rieder
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaha_Hadid
http://www.archdaily.com/523598/library-and-learning-centre-university-of-economics-
vienna-zaha-hadid-architects