Thoroughly modern
For much of her career, Zaha Hadid has orchestrated phenomenal designs that have won both competitions and plaudits, but until lately, many have languished on the drawing board. Has the world at last caught up with her vision?
With its rippling curves and headlining position at the Olympic Park, 'starchitect' Zaha Hadid's London Aquatics Centre is the latest jewel in her glittering career. The centre is the first building that visitors to London's Olympic Park will experience. And it's an impressive first impression. The 2,800-ton 'stingray' roof, which took months of exacting preparations by structural engineers to position, is held aloft by just two concrete pillars at one end and a 5m-thick concrete wall at the other. Already, the roof has been declared the most structurally complicated part of the Games by Olympics' chiefs.
As an architect, Hadid has always pushed her own aesthetics and agenda. She was born in Iraq in 1950 - a time of progressive thinking - before relocating to London, where she studied at the Architectural Association School with Rem Koolhaas and other proponents of experimental European architecture. Her polarising designs have been both lauded and derided - though her critics were momentarily drowned out in 2004, when she became the first woman to receive the coveted Pritzker Architecture Prize.
The Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein (1994) was an early built project, demonstrating the unusual shapes and angles that architectural critics had admired in her conceptual work. The station never fulfilled its original purpose, not because her design failed to account for a fire engine's size (as was the story from early detractors), but because Vitra was included in a fire service region shortly after the building's completion, so it was never required.
Hadid designs structures that sit easily within their digital age. Eschewing the vertical, the 90-degree angle and virtually all straight lines, she embraces the smooth curves of conceptual fashion and electronics. Her built works, including the new National Museum of the XXI Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome, are often considered a huge challenge for contractors. But it seems that at last computer aided design and imaging software have caught up with Hadid's artistic imagination and hyper-organic sensibility. Her buildings - and designs - seem informed by a futuristic vision of life on the Starship Enterprise, rather than to function, budget or site usage.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, Lord Rothschild said of Hadid "At the same time as her theoretical and academic work, as a practicing architect Zaha Hadid has been unswerving in her commitment to modernism. Always inventive, she's moved away from existing typology, from high tech, and has shifted the geometry of buildings."
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