Architectural structures of zaha hadid. Zaha Hadid: architecture

“My whole life has been a relentless struggle to bring my ideas to concrete.”

© Zaha Hadid

World renowned British architect Zaha Mohammad Hadid capable of striking the imagination of any person. Its structures resemble space structures. They cannot but stand out among the rectangular buildings familiar to our eyes.

“I try to convey the emotions that a person experiences in the wild, in an unfamiliar, unexplored place. Comprehension of nature has nothing to do with a linear coordinate system. I'm interested in creating a space where you have a choice of coordinate system. Many people are not satisfied with this approach, because, in general, people do not like to question their ideas about right and wrong ", She says.

The architect received her largest awards and world recognition after fifty. In 2004, Zaha became the first female architect to receive the Pritzker Prize (analogous to the Nobel Prize among architects). The award ceremony took place in the building of the Hermitage Theater in St. Petersburg. Several years ago, during the celebration of the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, Zaha received the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Let's turn to history. Zaha Hadid was born in Iraq. Her father was one of the founders of the National Democratic Party of Iraq, a major Western-oriented industrialist. The girl never wore a burqa and, unlike the rest of the country's population, had the opportunity to travel freely around the world.

“I cannot say that I belong to any cultural community. I left Iraq when I was 15 years old, and after that did not live in the East. I would not say that my behavior fits into the framework of Muslim culture. With regard to gender discrimination, it seems to me that the difficulties became much greater as my work became convincing. ", - shared the architect.

Zaha received her primary education at a French monastery school in Baghdad. In 1968 she left for Lebanon, where she studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut. Then she continued her studies in London, at the Architectural Association, where she became a student of Rem Koolhaas, a famous Dutch architect and rebel. Koolhaas considered Zakha his most talented student and called him "a planet in its own orbit." Undoubtedly, Koolhaas as a "theorist of deconstructivism" had a great influence on Hadid. As a student, Zakha was fond of the Russian avant-garde, especially the work of Kazimir Malevich. She is currently a member of the International Board of Trustees for the establishment of the Melnikov House Museum in Moscow.

Hadid founded her own architecture firm, Zaha Hadid Architects, many years ago. Her famous signature style is present in all of the company's projects. The master's works are varied: from private mansions to opera houses and football stadiums. The appearance of the buildings is mesmerizing, but many critics argue about the practicality of such buildings. Zaha implements his projects all over the world, dispelling any doubts. For example, the football stadium in Qatar is striking not only in appearance, but also in technical devices. As conceived by the author, it will have a sliding roof. Thanks to this, the size of the room can be adjusted by increasing or decreasing it in half.

The Heydar Aliyev Center is called one of the most daring engineering projects of our time. It has become a new symbol of Baku and all of Azerbaijan. The cultural center is a complex structure that includes an auditorium, a museum, a concert hall, exhibition halls and administrative offices.

Throughout her career, Zaha was not afraid to experiment. Until the mid-2000s, the architect's work can be attributed to deconstructivism, then to parametric architecture. Its buildings with incredible interiors have become like spaceships.

It should be noted that large architectural structures are not the only occupation of the author. Zaha makes installations, theatrical sets, experimental furniture, shoe designs, interiors and even paints.

Zakha has been to Russia many times. In 2005, the architect collaborated with the Capital Group company. The work consisted of designing the Zhivopisnaya Tower residential complex on Zhivopisnaya Street in Moscow.

In 2012, in the area of ​​Rublevo-Uspenskoe highway, a futuristic mansion was built - one of the most unusual buildings of Zakha in Russia. Three years later, another presentation of the architect's work took place. The Dominion Tower business center, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects in an avant-garde style, has opened in the Dubrovka area. The building consists of seven floors shifted relative to each other.

Throughout his career, Zaha has been teaching, giving lectures and arranging master classes in many countries of the world. Hadid gave a keynote lecture at the Moscow Central House of Architects (CDA). A year later, within the framework of the ARCH Moscow exhibition, Zakha held a master class.

“It is very difficult for a woman to become an architect, because the profession puts a lot of pressure on a person and takes up an enormous amount of time that a woman wants to spend on family and children. Look at me: I work all the time, and I have no family or children. But I have a different goal. My whole life has been a relentless struggle to bring my ideas to concrete. "- Hadid admits.

Her work has always been in the spotlight. But the projects that won the competitions remained unrealized. For many years the architect worked “on the table”, unable to carry out her plans. The opinion was established that her projects were good on paper, but could not be implemented. Zaha was able to prove otherwise. Critics consider her to be the most popular and sought-after architect of our time.

Editors Note: Quoted from a 2004 interview by Zaha Hadid with SALON Magazine.

Born in Baghdad in 1950, the son of an industrialist, one of the founders of the National Democratic Party of Iraq, a representative of the Western-oriented big bourgeoisie. Already at the age of 11, she decided that she wanted to become an architect.

In 1972, after graduating from the mathematics department of the American University of Beirut, Hadid entered the architecture school of the Architectural Association in London. Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zengelis were her teachers there.

She was strongly influenced as an architect by the Russian architectural avant-garde of the 1920s and the work of Kazimir Malevich, but her creative language remains brightly original. Koolhaas called it "a planet in its own orbit." Zengelis considered her the most talented person who ever studied with him. But, according to his recollections, she needed help with the development of secondary details - especially with the stairs, which in her student projects always rested against the ceiling.

In 1977 she worked for six months in the studio of Rem Koolhaas OMA, in 1979 she founded her own bureau Zaha Hadid Architects in London. With her original and uncompromising approach to creativity, Hadid could not deal with small orders for individuals, so she remained teaching at the Architectural Association (until 1987), continuing to design and participate in competitions.

Her project of the Peak Club (1983) on a hill above Hong Kong, which won a major international competition, attracted public attention to Hadid, but remained unrealized as the client went bankrupt.

In 1994, Hadid became widely known in Great Britain, having won a competition for the project of an opera house in Cardiff, but the developer - under the influence of public opinion - after a year and a half of conflicts, abandoned the project, fearing the originality of the architectural solution.

Hadid's first project was the Vitra fire station in Vejle am Rhine (1991-1993).

The situation changed dramatically in 1999, when the construction of the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, USA (opened in 2003) began - from that moment on, Hadid began to be invited to work in different countries of the world, and in 2004 she became the first woman in history to receive the Pritzker Prize.

Zaha Hadid's paintings and drawings have been exhibited many times in many countries; the first major exhibition was a retrospective at AA in 1983. Major exhibitions were also held at the GA Gallery in Tokyo (1985), the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York (1988) as part of a group of deconstructivist architects, at Harvard University (1994) and even in the waiting room of Grand Central Station in New York (1995), as well as at the Vienna MAK (2003) and New York's Guggenheim Museum (2006). Hadid's works are included in many museum collections, in particular - MoMA and the German Museum of Architecture in Frankfurt am Main (DAM).

Architectural design is not a prerogative of men only. In 2004, Zaha Hadid won the Pritzker Prize, becoming the first woman to receive it.

Pritzker Prize - 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 company, which was organized by Zaha Hadid in 1980 - Zaha Hadid Architects, created 950 projects in 44 countries. The staff currently employs 400 architects from 55 nationalities.

Hadid didn't have a complicated biography. She was born in 1950 in Iraq to a wealthy and pro-European industrialist family. 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 for architecture. After school, she left to study mathematics in Beirut, from there - to London, and almost never returned to her homeland. In Great Britain, she entered an architecture school, where the great Dutchman Rem Koolhaas became her mentor. Like a teacher, she adored the Russian avant-garde: her 1977 graduation project for a hotel-bridge over the Thames is one big reference to Malevich. Hadid was so gifted that Koolhaas named her "A planet in its own orbit", and immediately after graduation from school he took a partner in the OMA bureau. After three years, she will leave to start her practice.

Hadid won her first competition in Hong Kong - in 1982 with the project of a sports club on the top of one of the local mountains. Her proposal - a suprematist composition that denies gravity - made Hadid famous among specialists. It could have launched her career, but this did not happen: the club was not built, only beautiful axonometrics remained from the project. Paradoxically, the reason was not technical difficulties or the 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 Hong Kong losing its freedom were so great that a year later, the customer chose to cancel the construction. Hadid returned to London and with the money raised from the competition, she opened an office and began to work at 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 easily pass for a pavilion made by Soviet avant-garde artists of the 1920s. A couple of years later, she won the competition to create an opera in Cardiff three times, but it was not built. Before receiving Pritzker, Hadid had one serious work at all - the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in provincial Cincinnati, completed a year before the award, which was named, however, the most important new building in the United States since the end of the Cold War.

In the summer of 2014, opening her new building in Hong Kong, Zaha Hadid looked like a triumphant. Sandwiched between highway overpasses and the faceless high-rise buildings of southern Kowloon, the curved aluminum Tower of Innovation at a local university of technology would seem foreign 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, large gadgets, pieces of a future ideally calculated on a computer, suddenly finding themselves on an imperfect planet. But this was not the reason for the triumph - not the building, but the city itself. For two-thirds of her career, Zaha Hadid has been a critically-acclaimed paper architect. Hong Kong is the culprit of its delayed success.

In hindsight, it might seem that the award for Zaha Hadid was a political decision of 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, Frenchwoman Odile Decck had already achieved fame - but what's the difference), besides, 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 a fashion for global superstar architects who have become heroes of popular culture. Hadid was to become 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 Art of the XXI century in Rome and Evelyn Grace High School in London. Located in the north of Rome, the MAXXI museum is the opus magnum of Hadid, to which she walked for three decades. Now Hadid no longer cares about deconstructivism: since the mid-2000s, her buildings have smooth shapes, and their design is calculated on a computer as a complex equation that connects all parts of the building. Responsible for the latter is co-author Hadid and director of her bureau Patrick Schumacher, who is the main theoretician of parametric architecture. Working at the desk, they waited for technology to bring their imaginations to life, and now they waited.

The insides of MAXXI are either the intestines of a strange animal, or the bed of an underground river, washing 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", it lives in a world without gravity, and its conditional spaces without a floor and 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 once it becomes massive, this architecture becomes predictable in its uniqueness. She is so unusual and so alien to the European that all the time she looks at the same face, as if Hadid is inventing the same thing over and over again. Moreover, it turns out that this distinctive architecture is not so difficult to copy: in China, the British have already had pirates.

Having won the competition in 2007 in Azerbaijan, Zaha Hadid Architects designed the Heydar Aliyev Center. After gaining independence in 1991, Baku is striving with all its might to get away from the architecture of the Soviet heritage. 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-repetition are not the worst thing. Transformed from paper to mass architect, Zaha Hadid was trapped: she became a fashionable superstar architect exactly when the fashion for such stars began to fade. It turned out that the Bilbao effect does not work; after the 2008 recession, leftism, frugality and a social approach are in vogue. Hadid's buildings are the exact opposite: in 2014 she is 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 despotism of the Middle East, where they are not at all respected human rights.

She is accused of workers dying in the construction of a vagina-like stadium in Qatar. In response, Hadid and Schumacher declare 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 in the future, society will become more progressive and more humane. They are not exactly believed, and the Pritzker jury is jokingly giving a new award to the 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 did not sell buildings, but hope for progress and memories of a bright 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. Zaha Hadid has been an avant-garde architect all her life, but now she has nothing to sell anymore. In 2014, her unusual structures are just buildings.

Little is known about Zaha Hadid's personal life and views. 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." Because of her career, she never got 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 is glad that her example has inspired many people around the world. She is confident that women are smart and strong.

Zaha Hadid's apartment is located near the office in London's Clerkenwell - and judging by what people who have visited it, it is a surgically clean space cluttered with avant-garde furniture. White, faceless and soulless - not so much a house as a temporary and uninhabited refuge. Hadid drives a BMW, loves Comme des Garçons, sometimes watches Mad Men, looks at his phone too often. She has no personal life - she has projects. Zaha Hadid was shortlisted for the Stirling Award for the Aquatics Center for the sixth time in 2014, built for the London 2012 Olympics.

Despite criticism in the press, next year she will open five more iconic buildings in different parts of the world, and in a year - five more, and she will almost certainly be nominated for the seventh, eighth and millionth times. Hadid is now 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 to come. There is no bright future, but they still have a future ahead of them.

In 2015, Zaha Hadid was included in the list of the 100 most influential figures in Europe at number 59.

Guys, we put our soul into the site. Thank you for
that you discover this beauty. Thanks for the inspiration and the goosebumps.
Join us at Facebook and In contact with

Brilliant work of the most famous female architect.

Zaha Hadid is an outstanding modern architect. In 2004, she became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize (analogous to the Nobel Prize among architects).

The buildings designed by her office cannot be confused with anything else. Erected in different parts of the globe, they remain everywhere as aliens, building contact with the environment in different ways.

In memory of the greatest architect site collected her best projects for you.

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, museum, 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 it took 7 years 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 grand construction on an area of ​​585,000 sq. Its capacity is 40,000 spectators, while the upper tier of the stadium will be removable, which will reduce its capacity by half after the end of the championship.

Golden Metro Station in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

But in the capital of Saudi Arabia, they will build a metro station made 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 the station itself. There will also be a new passenger pass system that should help avoid rush hour crush.

Multipurpose complex Beko Masterplan in Belgrade, Serbia

The complex of apartments, offices and leisure spaces, located in the abandoned territory of an old textile factory, is intended to become a new landmark in Belgrade. In addition to the programs listed above, the proposed complex also includes a five-star hotel, a 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 lined with a zigzag that delimits 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 house a spa, garden and indoor pool.

Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China

The new university aims to become an architectural landmark. It will be a complex of educational and research laboratories. The seamless architecture of the building symbolizes the dynamic 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 an existing building by German architect Siegfried Wolske. Hadid's work contains two transparent facades facing the river. Around the building, it is planned to build terraces where outdoor performances will be held.

40-story hotel in Macau, China

The building consists of two towers connected at the podium and roof level, 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, lobbies, restaurants, a spa and an 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 Center for Art and Culture, China

An ensemble of the "Bolshoi Theater", the Museum of Contemporary Art and the "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 an in-depth "courtyard" with restaurants and shops.