2011 THE STUDY OF THE LIFE AND SELECTED WORKS OF ZAHA HADID

ARC 601 (CONTEMPORARY PROCESS OF ARCHITECTURE)

by OGUH EZEDINMA ANOZIE

10/17/2011

INTRODUCTION
Zaha Hadid is an architect who consistently pushes the boundaries of architecture and urban design. Her work experiments with new spatial concepts intensifying existing urban landscapes in the pursuit of a visionary aesthetic that encompasses all fields of design, ranging from urban scale through to products, interiors and furniture. Best known for her seminal built works (Vitra Fire Station, Land Formation-One, Bergisel Ski Jump, Strasbourg Tram Station and Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati) her central concerns involve a simultaneous engagement in practice, teaching and research.

LIFE AND CAREER

Zaha Hadid was single-minded from an early age. Born in 1950 in Baghdad, she grew up in a very different Iraq from the one we know today. The Iraq of her childhood was a liberal, secular, western-focused country with a fast-growing economy that flourished until the Baath party took power in 1963, and where her bourgeois intellectual family played a leading role.. Hadid saw no reason why she should not be equally ambitious. Female role models were plentiful in liberal Iraq, but in architecture, female role models anywhere, let alone in the Middle East, were thin on the ground in the 1950s and 1960s. No matter. After convent school in Baghdad and Switzerland, and a degree in mathematics at the American University in Beirut, Hadid enrolled at the Architectural Association in London in 1972. The AA of the 1970s was the perfect place for ambitious, independently minded architects would-be to flourish. Under Alvin Boyarski as director, it became the most fertile place for the architectural imagination, home to a precocious generation of students and teachers who are now household names, such as Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Will Alsop and Bernard Tschumi. It was a period when pre-1968 optimistic

modernism was being abandoned amid economic uncertainty and cultural conservatism. In architecture too, democratic modernism was perceived to have failed and there was a swing towards historicist post-modernism and conservation. The AAs theorists did the opposite. They rejected kitsch postmodernism to become still more modernist. Like snakes shedding their skins, they discarded the failed utopian projects of first modernism to think up a new modernism with a more sophisticated idea of history and human identity, an architecture embodying modernitys chaos and disjuncture in its very shape. After graduating she worked with her former teachers, Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, becoming a partner in 1977. But she didnt last long there. Koolhaas described her at the time as a planet in her own orbit. Hadid had her own ideas on architecture to nurture. And it was a long incubation. She started teaching at the AA while developing her own brand of neo-modernist architecture, one which went back to modernisms roots in the constructivism and suprematism of the early 20th century. Her graduation project, a hotel on Londons Hungerford Bridge, was called Malevichs Tectonik, after the suprematist Kasimir Malevich who wrote in 1928: we can only perceive space when we break free from the earth, when the point of support disappears. Hadids architecture follows suit, creating a landscape which metaphorically and, perhaps, one day literally seems to take off. It was with Koolhaas that she met the engineer Peter Rice who gave her support and encouragement early on, at a time when her work seemed difficult to build. In 1980 she established her own London-based practice. During the 1980s she also taught at the Architectural Association. She has also taught at prestigious institutions around the world. During the 1980s she also taught at the Architectural Association. She has also taught at prestigious institutions around the world; she held the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, the Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture, guest professorships at the Hochschule fr Bildende Knste in Hamburg, the Knowlton School of Architecture, at The Ohio State University, the Masters Studio at Columbia University, New York and the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut. In addition, she was made Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an Honorary Fellow of the American

Institute of Architects.[1] She has been on the Board of Trustees of The Architecture Foundation. She is currently Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in Austria.

You could call her work baroque modernism. Baroque classicists like Borromini shattered Renaissance ideas of a single viewpoint perspective in favour of dizzying spaces designed to lift the eyes and the heart to God. Likewise, Hadid shatters both the classically formal, rule bound modernism of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier and the old rules of space walls, ceilings, front and back, right angles. She then reassembles them as what she calls a new fluid, kind of spatiality of multiple perspective points and fragmented geometry, designed to embody the chaotic fluidity of modern life. Hadids architecture denies its own solidity. Short of creating actual forms that morph and change shape still the stuff of science fiction Hadid creates the solid apparatus to make us perceive space as if it morphs and changes as we pass through. Perhaps wisely, she talks little about theory. Unlike, say, Daniel Libeskind, she does not say that a shape symbolises this or that. And she wears her cultural identity lightly. Noticeably, and uncharacteristically diplomatically, she has declined to comment on the situation in Iraq. Instead Hadid lets her spaces speak for themselves. This does not mean that they are merely exercises in architectural form. Her obsession with shadow and ambiguity is deeply rooted in Islamic architectural tradition, while its fluid, open nature is a politically charged riposte to increasingly fortified and undemocratic modern urban landscapes. All of which would have been impossible without the advent of computer-aided design to allow architects almost infinite freedom to create any shape they wanted.

Actually building these new kinds of spaces was another matter. Such melodramatic shapes required significant investment, both financially and in terms of engineering. In the 1980s, the first tentative steps were taken when architects such as Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry began the long process of convincing the public to love them, and clients to invest in them. Hadid was picked as part of the seminal Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the first definitive survey of the new generation. Critics loved it, but most MoMA visitors found the new shapes, particularly Hadids, baffling. She presented her ideas in impressionistic, abstract paintings, designed to get across the feel of her spaces. Hadid explained that conventional architectural drawings could never convey the feel of her radical, fluid spaces, but paintings could. It took time, though, for people to understand them. Slowly, curious clients emerged who were willing to spend money to realise Hadids peculiar new architecture. It was a stuttering start. Her first big success, The Peak, a spa planned for Hong Kong, was never built. Nor were buildings on Berlins Kurfrstendamm, or an art and media centre in Dusseldorf. Hadids first built project, The Fire Station at the production complex of the Vitra office furniture group at Weil-am-Rhein on the German-Swiss border was a formal success but not a functional one. The fire service moved out and the building was converted into a chair museum. The most notorious project, though, was Hadids 1994 competition-winning design for the Cardiff Bay Opera House, which was abandoned by the Millennium Commission after noisy opposition from local lobbyists, particularly Cardiff politicians wary of highbrow architecture being imposed on a Welsh city by London. Britain was still knee-deep in the conservative political and architectural culture that had emerged in the 1970s. Popular taste was gradually becoming more daring, but Hadids ideas were as yet a step too far. It was a sobering experience, which set back her office for several years, but one she learnt from. Hadid later became philosophical recently about Cardiff, seeing it as a turning point in her career. Without dumbing down, she has slowly learnt the politics of

how to get her work built. Slowly it worked. A ski jump in Innsbruck, then a tram station in Strasbourg. Somewhat ironically, it was traditionally conservative Midwestern America that gave Hadid her real break. The Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio was a chance to try out her ideas on a large scale and to conceive a stunning new take on curating and museum experience, imagined as a kit of parts, she says, which curators can customise for each show. The galleries are housed in horizontal oblong tubes floating above ground level, between which ribbon-like ramps zig and zag skywards. Its like an extension of the city, the urban landscape. Literally so. It is designed like an urban carpet, one end of which lies across the sidewalk at the busiest intersection in Cincinnati to yank in unsuspecting passers-by. Inside, the carpet rolls through the entrance, up the back wall, marked with light bands directing you like airport landing strips to the walkways, up which you can clamber like a child on a climbing frame, bouncing from artwork to artwork, shoved about by an architect who piles space high into a tower of tightly controlled vignettes, throwing your eye from the most intimate of spaces, to trompes loeils and out of the building through carefully positioned windows. Its about promenading, says Hadid, being able to pause, to look out, look above, look sideways. Her impressionistic new space was realised. The New York Times described it, without overstatement, as the most important new building in America since the Cold War. Cincinnati silenced all those who said Zaha Hadids architecture was impossible to build. And the ideas developed for Cincinnati were already being refined in other largescale projects, such as the MAXXI Contemporary Arts Centre in Rome (due to open next year), the BMW Central Building in Leipzig and Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg (both projects in Germany and opened in 2005). Crucially, Cincinnati gave Hadid the confidence to win a stream of commissions for: a ferry terminal in Salerno, Italy; a highspeed train station in Naples; a public archive, library and sport centre in Montpellier; Opera Houses in Dubai and Guangzhou, a performing arts centre in Abu Dhabi, private residences in Moscow and the USA as well as major master-planning projects in Bilbao, Istanbul and the Middle East. Even in conservative Britain, her adopted home, Hadid has recently completed Maggies Centre, a cancer care centre in Kirkaldy in Scotland. This

modest project marks the beginning of a plethora of UK based work including a transport museum in Glasgow, a gallery for the Architecture Foundation in London, a mixed-use development in Hoxton Square and the London 2012 Olympic Aquatics Centre. Undoubtedly, Hadid has cemented her reputation as one of the worlds most exciting and significant contemporary architects. By transcending the realm of paper architecture to the built form, Hadid is certain to complete many memorable projects in the future.

PROJECTS

GLASGOW RIVERSIDE MUSEUM OF TRANSPORT

Zaha has played a pivotal role in a great many Zaha Hadid Architects projects over the past 30 years. The MAXXI: National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome, Italy; the BMW Central Building (2005) in Leipzig, Germany and the Phaeno Science Center (2005) in Wolfsburg, Germany are excellent demonstrations of Hadids quest for complex, fluid space. Previous seminal buildings such as the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art (2003)in Cincinnati, Ohio USA , have also been hailed as architecture that transforms our vision of the future with new spatial concepts and bold, visionary forms.

Other works include

 Hoenheim-North Terminus & Car Park (2001), Hoenheim, France  Bergisel Ski Jump (2002), Innsbruck, Austria  Ordrupgaard annexe (2005), Copenhagen,
Guangzhou Opera House (2010), China

         

Denmark Maggie's Centres at the Victoria Hospital (2006), Kirkcaldy, Scotland Tondonia Winery Pavilion (20012006),[9] Haro, Spain Eleftheria Square redesign (2007), Nicosia, Cyprus Hungerburgbahn new stations (2007), Innsbruck, Austria Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion (Worldwide) Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York, London, Paris, Moscow, (20062008) Bridge Pavilion (2008), Zaragoza, Spain J. S. Bach Pavilion, Manchester International Festival (2009), Manchester, UK CMA CGM Tower (2010), Marseille, France Pierres Vives (20022012), Montpellier, France Guangzhou Opera House (2010), Guangzhou, People's Republic of China.

Wangjing Soho

musee-d-art-contemporain-cagliari


Current work

Currently Hadid is working on a multitude of projects worldwide including: the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympic Games; High-Speed Train Stations in Naples and Durango; the CMA CGM Headquarters tower in Marseille; the Fiera di Milano masterplan and tower as well as major master-planning projects in Beijing, Bilbao, Istanbul and Singapore. In the

Middle East, Hadids portfolio includes national cultural and research centres in Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, as well as the new Central Bank of Iraq.

CAIRO EXPO CITY, EGYPT

Heydar Aliyev, Cultural Centre

y y y y y y Baku, Azerbaijan 2007 TBC The Republic of Azerbaijan Under Construction 101,801m2 Building: 52,417m Site: 111,292m

currently under construction, 'heydar aliyev cultural centre' by internationally renowned architect zaha hadid is a new facility consisting of a museum, library and conference centre in baku, the republic of azerbaijan situated on a site measuring over 111,000 m2. The cultural centre is characterized by its fluid form which emerges out of the surrounding landscape. This rippling, manifest as earth mounds, fades as it moves away from the main building to radiate like waves. The building itself is also merges into the landscape to become the Cultural Plaza. A distinct sense of motion is established by a series of curves that fold out from the ground, creating organic shape openings within the skin. The skin of the building a single curving surface rises, undulates, and wraps inward at its base to completely envelop the buildings various volumes. The curved surface allows a freedom of form that can simultaneously

differentiate and unite the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre's three distinct programmatic elements. Its inward curl is formed into stairways and ramps that connect the lower floors to mezzanine levels; other circulation paths also emanate from the curves of the building envelope. An elevated bridge connects the library to the conference hall. It provides a major new venue, landmark and source of regeneration for the city of Baku admitting visitors to a library, museum and conference centre through folds in its continuous outer skin, the interior spaces flooded with natural light via a glass faade.

DEDUCTIONS
The cultural centre is characterized by its fluid form which emerges out of the surrounding landscape. The building itself is also merges into the landscape to become the Cultural Plaza. Thus making it an excellent example of fluid land-form fractals.

London Aquatics Centre

y y y y y y y y y y y y y

Among the impressive projects created for the 2012 Olympic Games in London is the recently opened Olympic Aquatics Centre designed by the world renowned Zaha Hadid Architects. The architectural concept of the London Aquatic Centre is inspired by the fluid geometries of water in motion, creating spaces and a surrounding environment in sympathy with the river landscape of the Olympic Park. An undulating roof sweeps up from the ground as a wave, enclosing the pools of the Centre with its unifying gesture of fluidity, while also describing the volume of the swimming and diving pools. The Aquatics Centre is designed with an inherent flexibility to accommodate 17,500 spectators for the London 2012 Games in Olympic mode while also providing the optimum spectator capacity of 2000 for use in Legacy mode after the Games.

Ground Floor: 15,402m First Floor: 16387m Seating Area: 7352m (17500 capacity) Footprint Area: 21,897m Legacy:

London, United Kingdom 2005 2011 Olympic Delivery Authority Built 36,875m2 Olympic: Basement: 3,725m

The London Aquatic Centre is situated within the Olympic Park Masterplan. The site is positioned on the south eastern edge of the Olympic Park with direct proximities to Stratford. The new pedestrian access from the east-west bridge called the Stratford City Bridge which links the Stratford City development with the Olympic Park will cross over the LAC. This will provide a very visible frontage for the LAC along the bridge. Several smaller pedestrian bridges will connect the site to the Olympic Park over the existing canal. The Aquatic Centre addresses within its design the main public realm spaces implicit within the Olympic Park and Stratford City planning. These are primarily the east-west connection of the Stratford City Bridge and continuation of the Olympic Park space alongside the canal. The Aquatic Centre is planned on an orthogonal axis perpendicular to the Stratford City Bridge. Along this axis are laid out the three pools. The training pool is located under the bridge whilst the competition and diving pools are within a large volumetric pool hall. The overall strategy is to frame the base of the pool hall as a podium by surrounding it and connecting it into the bridge. This podium element allows for the containment of a variety of differentiated and cellular programmatic elements into a single architectural volume which is seen to be completely assimilated with the bridge and the landscape. From the bridge level the podium emerges from underneath the bridge to cascades around the pool hall to the lower level of the canal side level. The pool hall is expressed above the podium level by a large roof which is arching along the same axis as the pools. Its form is generated by the sightlines for the spectators during the Olympic mode. Double-curvature geometry has been used to create a structure of

parabolic arches that create the unique characteristics of the roof. The roof undulates to differentiate an internal visual separation inside the pool hall between the competition pool volume and the diving pool volume. The roof projects beyond the base legacy pool hall envelope to extend the roof covering to the external areas of the cascades and the bridge entrance. The roof projection over the bridge entrance announces the London Aquatic Centres presence from the approach from either Stratford City or the Olympic Park. Structurally the roof is grounded at 3 primary positions. Otherwise the opening between the roof and the podium is in-filled with a glass facade.

DEDUCTIONS
The architectural concept of the London Aquatic Centre is inspired by the fluid geometries or fluid fractals of water in motion. Fluid fractals is the backbone of design, giving the building its organic architectural qualities. It does not take shape of any normal geometry of circles, squares e.t.c. Thus losing geometries conventionary four cardinal views of front, left side, right side, back elevation. Fluid fractal gives the building its, inherent flexibility.

Mobile Art Chanel Contemporary Art Container

y y y y y y y Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, currently Paris 2008 2010 Chanel Built 700m2 29m x 45m 74t of Steel

Chanel Contemporary Art Container, a travelling art space

designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, has opened in its first destination, Hong Kong. The pavilion,

commissioned by Chanel head designer Karl Lagerfeld, hosts an exhibition of artworks inspired by Chanel bags by 20 artists and called Mobile Art. Hadids

architecture transforms our vision of the future with new spatial concepts and bold, visionary forms.I think through our architecture, we can give people a glimpse of another world, and enthuse them, make them excited about ideas. Our architecture is intuitive, radical, international and dynamic. We are concerned with constructing buildings that evoke original experiences, a kind of strangeness and newness that is comparable to the experience of going to a new country. The Mobile Art Pavilion for Chanel follows these principles of inspiration, states Zaha Hadid. The Mobile Art Pavilion for Chanel is the very latest evolution of Hadids architectural language that generates a sculptural sensuality with a coherent formal logic. This new architecture flourishes via the new digital modelling tools that augment the design process with techniques of continuous fluidity. Zaha Hadid explains this process, The complexity and technological advances in digital imaging software and construction techniques have made the architecture of the Mobile Art Pavilion possible. It is an architectural language of fluidity and nature, driven by new digital design and manufacturing processes which have enabled us to create the Pavilions totally organic forms instead of the serial order of repetition that marks the architecture of the industrial 20th century. A unique sculptural pavilion created as an exhibition/event space for Chanel inspired by the brands distinctive layering of exquisite details within an elegant, cohesive whole created as a series of continuous arches, sequencing towards a central courtyard the entire structure flooded by through translucent walls and ceilings. The Mobile Art Pavilions organic form has evolved from the spiralling shapes found in nature. This system of organisation and growth is among the most frequent in nature and offers an appropriate expansion towards its circumference, giving the Pavilion generous public areas at its entrance with a 128m2 terrace. The Pavilion follows the parametric distortion of a torus. In its purest geometric shape, the circular torus is the most fundamental diagram of an exhibition space. The

distortion evident in the Pavilion creates a constant variety of exhibition spaces around its circumference, whilst at its centre, a large 65m2 courtyard with natural lighting provides an area for visitors to meet and reflect on the exhibition. This arrangement also allows visitors to see each other moving through the space and interacting with the exhibition. In this way, the architecture facilitates the viewing of art as a collective experience. The central courtyard will also host evening events during the exhibition in each host city. The organic shell of the Mobile Art Pavilion is created with a succession of reducing arched segments. As the Pavilion will travel over three continents, this segmentation also gives an appropriate system of partitioning allowing the Pavilion to be easily transported in separate, manageable elements. Each structural element will be no wider than 2.25 m. The partitioning seams become a strong formal feature of the exterior faade cladding, whilst these seams also create a spatial rhythm of perspective views within the interior exhibition spaces.

MOBILE ART PAVILION FOR CHANEL (ZAHA HADID speaks)

The Mobile Art Pavilion for Chanel, initially inspired by Chanels signature quilted bag and conceived through a system of natural organisation, is also shaped by the functional considerations of the exhibition. However, these further determinations remain secondary and precariously dependent on the overriding formal language of the Pavilion. An enigmatic strangeness has evolved between the Pavilions organic system of logic and these functional adaptations arousing the visitors curiosity even further. In creating the Mobile Art Pavilion for Chanel, Zaha Hadid has developed the fluid geometries of natural systems into a continuum of fluent and dynamic space where oppositions between exterior and interior,

light and dark, natural and artificial landscapes are synthesised. Lines of energy converge within the Pavilion, constantly redefining the quality of each exhibition space whilst guiding movement through the exhibition. The work of selected artists has been commissioned for the exhibition. Hadid created an entire landscape for their work, rather than just an exhibition space. Visitors will be guided through the space using the latest digital technology developed in collaboration with the artists. The fascination of the Mobile Art Pavilion is the challenge of translating the intellectual and physical into the sensual experimenting with completely unexpected and totally immersive environments for this global celebration of the iconic work of Chanel. I see the Pavilion as a kind of a total artwork that continually reinvents itself as it moves from Asia, to the USA and Europe, states Zaha Hadid.

Deductions
Chanel Contemporary Art Container, is an excellent example of fractal geometry, its signature is written all over it. Carefully analyzing this building, Zaha Hadid skillfully applied fractal geometry in its design concept. The following characteristics of fractals can be recognized, 1 self similarities Mobile Art Chanel Contemporary Art Container, was created by a series of self similar but continuous arches, sequencing towards a central courtyard. The Mobile Art Pavilions organic form which evolved from the spiraling shapes found in nature. The circular arches are Self-similar but at different scales. The basic element of a circular spiral shape is repeated throughout the building. The Pavilion follows the parametric distortion of a torus. In its purest geometric shape, the circular torus is the most fundamental diagram of an exhibition space. Any structure is self-similar if it has under-gone a transformation in which the proportions of the structure have all been modified by the same scaling factor. Golden spiral The Mobile Art Contemporary Art Container practically took the shape of a nautilus shell which occurs in nature. Thus displaying another important characteristics of fractals, the Gold Rule which produces the Gold Spiral, this characteristic is what brings organic architecture into this design.