The Paper Architect

For a long time, Zaha Hadid was known as “the paper architect,” someone whose grand designs never left the page to become real buildings. But in recent years her buildings have sprung up like mushrooms all over the world: the Guangzhou Opera House in China, a car factory in Germany, a contemporary art museum in Rome, a transportation museum in Scotland, and the Aquatics Center for the 2012 Olympics in London.

Pinning down her individual style is difficult. Certainly Hadid has been influenced by the modern trend in architecture that likes to play with the traditional shape of buildings and fragment (分解) them, creating unpredictable angles and surfaces. Working in this way, she and her fellow architects have produced some spaceship-like structures that seem to go against the normal laws of engineering.

The idea of offering the viewer multiple perspectives from within the building is a theme that runs through Hadid’s work. Her most famous building, MAXXI—a museum for the 21st century— in Rome, is a great example. It is a complex and spectacular structure of interlocking concrete shapes. Inside spaces interconnect Tike winding streets, so that the visitor is surprised and charmed at each turn. The Rosenthal Center in Cincinnati produces a similar effect. Like an extension of the street it sits on, it draws you in, with walkways directing you this way and that, and windows inviting you to sample the view. “It’s about promenading” says Hadid, “being able to pause, to look out, look above, look sideways.”

So what inspires someone like Hadid to produce such different buildings? She speaks in complimentary terms about the work of her contemporaries. She also cites the natural landscape and organic geological patterns as an influence. But it is not a question that she seems too concerned with and nor perhaps should we be. Hadid is an artist, sharing with us her vision of what buildings should be like and always, as she does so, trying to keep human interests—our interests as users and viewers—at heart.