EDITION KEIM
FLUID, KINETIC, PARAMETRIC
Zaha Hadid was one of the most dazzling but also innovative figures in the international architecture scene. Born in 1950 in Bagdad, legend has it that she already recognised her calling to architecture at the early age of eleven. Even so, she initially studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut until 1971, before moving to London where she attended the Architectural Association School from 1972 to 1977, and studied with Rem Koolhaas among others. It was in his OMA Office that she started her professional career, before setting up her own firm in London in 1980. For a long time, her bold designs were deemed to be impossible to build until she completed her first building with the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, Germany. This kick-started her career which took off from this point on a global scale; today her fluid buildings can be found all over the world. In 2002, the German architect Patrik Schumacher joined the business as a partner; he was involved in all the projects and ran the firm with its staff of more than 400 employees. In 2004, Zaha Hadid was the first woman to receive the renowned Pritzker Architecture Prize; from 2000 onwards she was also a professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna until she retired in 2015. Hadid‘s search for a new design language took her initially to deconstructivism, inspired by the work of the Russian constructivists Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky. In fact, Hadid succeeded in transforming the more intellectual deconstructivism into an individual form of architecture that she called fluid, kinetic and parametric. „The most important thing is motion,“ said Zaha Hadid in an exhibition catalogue in 2003, “the flux of things, a non-Euclidean geometry in which nothing repeats itself: a new order of space.“ And so planes shift, verticals tilt and space seems to gain a new dimension. Here she was surely helped by her mathematical mind: it takes an extraordinarily abstract, analytical approach to build like this – and efficient IT. It simply would not be possible to design the complicated volumes, let alone transfer them to construction plans and complete the building, without computers and parametric software.
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