Describe Zaha Hadid’s Style And Design Characteristics (Term Paper Sample)

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Zaha Hadid
Introduction
When exploring contemporary architecture, it is hard to overlook the work of the most outstanding female architect, Zaha Hadid. Hadid’s work featured radical ideas that were at first dismissed as impractical and seldom realized in concrete and steel. In fact, she was barely recognized in the early 1990s but the new millennium brought favors as she won various contracts to design iconic structures such as the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Phaeno Science Center and BMW building in Leipzig. Owing to her unique design for the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, she earned the Pritzker Prize became the first woman to ever attain the coveted architectural award (Jodidio 21). Hadid was known for being resilient and mentally tough, attributes that made her oppose conventional society and rise above the practical constraints that made it possible for her to achieve her dreams. She was distinguished for her innovative and unusual architectural designs that have forever changed the perspective of the architecture field (Zaha Hadid Architects 34).
Zaha Hadid was a British-Iraqi architect who was born on October 31, 1950, in the Iraq capital of Baghdad and died at the age of sixty-five in Miami, Florida on March 31, 2016. She was born to a wealthy, Islamic upper-class family that leaned toward westernization. Hadid’s father, Muhammad Husayn Hadid, was a wealthy Iraqi politician who at one time served as a finance minister and was known for co-founding a liberal Iraqi political movement, the National Democratic Party. On the other hand, Hadid’s mother had taken a significant interest in the artistic world, and Zaha later confirmed that her drawing ability emanated from her mother’s creative nature (Jodidio 12). During her early years, her parents’ took her to various architectural exhibitions, which played a significant role in her initial interest and passion for architecture. At six years of age, Hadid frequently went to architectural events in Baghdad that featured distinguished architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright (Zaha Hadid Architects 43).
At one of her interviews with the Guardian magazine, Zaha Hadid pointed out that she realized she wanted to be an architect at the Frank Lloyd exhibition at the Opera House in Baghdad. Her parents were very supportive as they encouraged and motivated her to pursue architecture and even took her to visit places that inspired her dreams. In her teenage years, her family toured the Sumerian region of Iraq, a trip that she said had an enormous impact on the aspects of architecture that she incorporated in her work. Hadid noted that she was keen to observe the Sumerian ruins and she admired how the landscapes, its wildlife, sand, reefs, water, and buildings flowed together and came alive to create beautiful sceneries. She said that her work tried to discover and reinvent the forms of urban planning and architecture that she saw in the Sumerian ruins in a contemporary manner (Jodidio 4).
Zaha Hadid traveled to Lebanon to pursue her studies in Mathematics at the American University of Beirut. She said that studying mathematics made her realize the similarities and relationship between the subject and architecture. After completing her degree studies, Hadid traveled to London in 1972 and enrolled in the Architectural Association School of Architecture where she pursued architecture. She briefly worked for Rem Koolhaas, who was a crucial figure in Hadid’s architectural life, and in 1980 she opened her office while she taught in various schools of architecture in London and other cities across the world (Jodidio 38).
Zaha Hadid’s style and design characteristics
Zaha Hadid’s professor, Koolhaas, described her as a planet on her orbit and pointed out that her designs were fixated to satisfy a broader picture, where she ignored small details that could be fixed quickly. Zenghelis, her former professor, said that they referred to her as the inventor of eighty-nine degrees her designs were rarely at ninety degrees or right angles. Zaha Hadid defiantly designed structures that did not conform to typical features of architecture but instead chose to delve into non-rectilinear shapes and sought her influence from fluid geometry and abstract ideas (Hadid and Schumacher 12). Some of the unique features in all Hadid’s designs were the unpredictability and a form of controlled chaos that came with the completed structure. Her designs incorporated fluid flow and a unique blend of curves, which left people amazed by their complex nature, the way they were built and how they were supported. Hadid’s radical designs were astonishing since the unusual and brazen architectural plans such as intertwined concrete limbs and overlapping walkways changed how an individual entered and moved within the buildings (Unwin 236).
Zaha Hadid never described herself as a follower of any distinct design school or style, and her architectural method or style cannot be categorized. She once defined her style by explaining that she tried to design structures that moved away from possessing ninety-degrees or right angles. She continued by saying that she liked to use diagonals because they represented an idea that reformed space (Zaha Hadid Architects 14). Experts in the architectural field described her designs to match architectural deconstructivism, which is a postmodern architectural movement that moves away from constrictive principles of modernism that include terms such as “purity of form” and “form follows functions.” By looking at Hadid’s architectural designs, one can agree that the structures possess various elements of deconstructivism in that they have an absence of symmetry, and some structures’ surfaces have been manipulated to form non-rectilinear shapes that distort the aspects of architecture.
A look at some of Zaha Hadid’s buildings such as London Aquatics Centre, Innovation Tower, and Port Authority Building shows the elements of architectural deconstructivism, where the buildings assume non- rectilinear shape and have a lot of curves. Hadid described such designs to have been inspired by fluid geometry. To emphasize on her unconventional architectural designs, Hadid said that she never dealt with traditional ideas that would result in cute, little buildings in rectangular shapes to typically save space. She said that her structures were like the landscape or the world, not defined by corners and insisted that they were completely practical although they were built using designs that revolved around different organizational patterns (Jodidio 45).
Patrik Schumacher, Zaha Hadid’s architectural collaborator, described Hadid’s work to fit parametricism, which is a contemporary architecture style that depends on algorithms, computers, and programs to influence equation for design functions. Schumacher refers to buildings such as the Dongdaemun Design Plaza and Phaeno Science Center when he talks about parametricism since the designs move away from conventionalism and are a result of fabrication technologies and advanced computation, thus creating incredibly complex and fluid compositions. Altogether, Zaha Hadid design could be said to have assumed concepts of fluidity. She integrated fluid and space of fragmented geometry and multiple perspective points to create a form of the chaotic fluidity of contemporary design. Hadid worked to ensure that space and form were turned into fluid spatial patterns (Hadid and Schumacher 187). As the rest of the paper investigates and describes Zaha Hadid’s work in Heydar Aliyev Center, London Aquatics Centre, Evelyn Grace Academy, and One Thousand Museum, additional revelations about her style and designs will emerge, therefore, clearly explaining her innovations.
Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku
Location and Details
Zaha Hadid Architects’ design was used in the construction of the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center, which is a building complex in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a country located in Southwest Asia. It is a huge steel and concrete marvel that exhibits a fluid form emanating from the topography and forming a fold that rises seventy-four meters high and curves inwards and outward to cover over fifty-seven thousand meters square of space. The cultural center complex and its structures are built on a site that extends for more than one hundred and eleven thousand meters square. The building complex features a library, museum, concert hall, cafes, gallery spaces, restaurants, and a large conference hall that holds three auditoriums. Heydar Aliyev Center is a cultural center that was named to bestow honor upon the first secretary of Soviet Azerbaijan, Heydar Aliyev, who later became the president of Azerbaijan Republic. The cultural center is located near Baku’s city center and forms an integral part of a development zone that is supposed to lead the city in culturally (Bekiroglu 11).
In 2007, Zaha Hadid’s firm was chosen to be the design architect for the Heydar Aliyev Center, after winning the bidding competition. The building complex was designed to serve as the country’s host for all the cultural programs. Zaha Hadid Architects, Hadid’s firm, needed to be creative since the proprietor wanted the structure to stand out and break the monotony of the surrounding buildings, which were constructed using the memorial soviet architecture that was dominant in Baku. The proprietor needed a magnificent structure that would express the refined sensitivity of Azeri culture and bring the Azerbaijan people toward a national identity. Construction commenced in 2007 with the primary contractor, DIA Holding, breaking ground and the cultural center was opened on May 10, 2012, by the Azerbaijan president (Bekiroglu 7)....