Zaha Hadid - the Star Architect
Zaha Hadid is one of the stars in today's architectural firmament. She is a pioneer of the avant-garde and her work again and again tests out the limits of architectural design and thinking.
Through her early competition successes, she had already gained enormous recognition throughout the world at the beginning of the 1980s for her original development of modern architecture. Her latest triumph is the award of the Pritzker Prize, the "Nobel Prize for architects", which was conferred upon her in spring 2004. Each of her projects unfolds with new "excitement and innovation; praised Frank Gehry as one of the jurors and acclaimed; one of the clearest architectural trajectories we've seen in many years.
As early as the 1970s, Zaha Hadid was considered a prodigy at London's school of the avant-garde, the Architectural Association (AA). She has been teaching at the AA since the late 1980s and has held prestigious guest professorships at American elite universities, including Harvard, Columbia and Yale. She is currently Professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Hadid's work is distinguished by an unusual form language that captivates the viewer with its spatial dynamics. One of the first examples of this architecture is the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein (1993). Her recently finished structures include the ski jump on the Bergisel Mountain in Innsbruck and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati – the first museum project in the USA to be designed and realised by a woman.
Her projects have already been exhibited in museums and galleries of international standing such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Zaha Hadid has taken part several times in the Biennale in Venice. For the planning and materialisation of the phæno Zaha Hadid, has formed an architectural partnership with Mayer Bährle, BDA, in Lörrach. This team has already proved its worth with joint work carried out on projects in Weil am Rhein.
