New-Age Approach on Architecture

Zaha Hadid's approach to architecture is best described as Baroque Modernism. She takes her De-constructivist style of breaking down traditional architectural values that modernists such Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier value–walls, ceilings, right angles and so on, and combines it with Baroque Modernism.  Baroque Modernism goes against single one viewpoint perspective.

Her designs for buildings make the spectator to believe the space is morphing. She describes her work as having "a new fluid kind of spatiality." Her work is described by her spectators and colleagues as "denying it's own solidity."
The Peak is a perfect example of this.

These are all concept paintings and drawing for The Peak Leisure Spa in Hong Kong. The actual building was never built due to it's "unrealistic" design. She became more known for the work that didn't get past concept art, than for the work that she actually accomplished.

Her first actual success was the the Vitra Fire Station in Germany.

The Vitra Fire Station features extreme geometric and hard edges. It was a formal success, but not a functional one. Although the building has a space-age and futuristic feel like most of her work does, it wasn't a practical approach. It especially wasn't practical for a building that is more for function than form and aesthetic beauty (it is a FIRE STATION after all). Her most notorious project was a 1994 competition-winning design for the Cardiff Bay Opera House.

The project was abandon by Millennium Commission b/c criticism from local lobbyists and politicians in Cardiff, Wales due to criticism by local lobbyists and politicians in Cardiff, Wales. At the time Britain was still very much conservative in politics and architecture. This project was a major set back for her and her office but she considered it to be a turning point in her career. Hadid received her "big break" when she was commissioned to design The Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The Rosenthal Center of Contemporary Art provided for Hadid a chance to try out her ideas of new take on curating and museum experience. Her design creates the illusion of hovering blocks and shapes. The building is "designed like “an urban carpet”, one end of which lies across the sidewalk at the busiest intersection in Cincinnati to yank in unsuspecting passers-by." The New York Times described it, without overstatement, as “the most important new building in America since the Cold War.”

This project silenced all critics that stated the Hadid's work and architecture was impossible to build. It also opened doors for future commissions such as:

the MAXXI Contemporary Arts Centre in Rome

 the BMW Central Building in Leipzig

Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg 

Zaha Hadid is in my personal opinion, the epitome of the new-age architect. Her philosophical views on architecture is ahead of it's time. Her work reflects that of her radical, non-compromising over-the-top personality.

She grew up in 1950s liberal, secular, western-focused Iraq. (Which is much different from the Iraq that comes to mind today). Her father was politician, economist, industrialist co-founder of the Iraqi National Democratic and a leader of the Iraqi Progressive Democratic Parties. It's easy to see where she obtained her ambitious drive from. She went to convent school in Baghdad and Switzerland and obtained a degree in Mathematics at American University in Beirut. Afterward she enrolled in Architectural Association(AA) in London 1972 (place architectural imagination; home to the greats Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Will Alsop and Bernard Tschumi) but was especially drawn to work of Koolhaas.

AA rejected kitsch post-modernism; adopted “new modernism with a more sophisticated idea of history and human identity”. With post-modernism at it's peak in the sixties, Architectural Association went in the opposite direction in adopting a neo-modernism.

After graduating in 1977, Koolhaas offered her a job at his and  and Elia Zenghelis’s new firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (which didn't last long). Koolhaas even described her as "a planet in her own orbit," I can't think of a better way to summarize Hadid's own way of thinking. She then started teaching at AA while developing her own neo-modernist style.

Her graduation project was a hotel on London's Hungerford Bridge called Malevich's Tectonik, named after the supremacist Kasimir Malevich who wrote:“we can only perceive space when we break free from the earth, when the point of support disappears.”

This is a concept painting for a fourteen-level hotel  on the Hungerford Bridge in London. It was inspired by Russian Suprematist movement.