Zaha Hadid Research Articles

Replicant urbanism: the architecture of Hadid's Central Building at BMW, Leipzig

‘With Blade Runner's replicants, circulating capital achieves its highest form and real subsumption attains its ultimate stage of development: the replicants become the privileged objects of society's intelligence.’1The term ‘replicant’, drawn from the 1982 film Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott, is used here to conceptualise the ‘urbanism’ produced within the Central Building designed by Zaha Hadid Architects for BMW's plant at Leipzig in 2005. It is used not so as to critique the project's urban dimension as fake, but to propose that it is, like the humanoid replicants of the film, a new reality produced by corporate capital designed to function in its service as an improved version of the original from which it is derived.2 This proposition is developed through an analysis of the models of labour organisation currently utilised within managerial practice, and the confluence of its concerns with those of certain currents in contemporary architecture. The BMW Central Building is also analysed in the economic and political contexts of the plant's specific location, and with reference to the architectural means through which it has been designed to replicate and instrumentalise urban organisational patterns for the corporation.

Don't Waste Your Time in the Countryside

With the countryside becoming ever more sparsely populated as fewer people are needed to keep rural enterprises running, is there any point in engaging architects there? Patrik Schumacher, partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, argues that their time and skills are put to better use in cities, where buildings impact a far greater number of individuals and their social and cultural functionality is more important. Engineers, meanwhile, are perfectly equipped to devise generic solutions for the rural realm.

On the media coverage of Zaha Hadid's death

On the media coverage of Zaha Hadid's death

Constructions of Zaha Hadid

Constructions of Zaha Hadid

The powerless starchitect: How Zaha Hadid became the first person working on the Al-Wakrah stadium that actually did die

Starchitect Zaha Hadid won the bid to design one of the planned stadiums for the 2022 FIFA World Cup event in Qatar. Her design for the Al-Wakrah stadium became the centrepiece of a discussion on the role that starchitects play in society. That debate reached a boiling point in August 2014, and resulted in a digital lynching party that sheds serious doubts on the ethics and professionalism of architectural critics and journalists alike.

Brutalist Architecture: An Autoethnographic Examination of Structure and Corporeality

Brutalist Architecture: An Autoethnographic Examination of Structure and Corporeality

Upgrading Computational Design

Shajay Bhooshan heads up the computation and design ZHACODE group at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) and is a course master at the Architectural Association Design Research Laboratory (AADRL). Here he argues that Parametricism 2.0 has a vital role to play in the progressing of computational design. Assimilating the exploratory developments of the last 15 years, he asserts how the next phase of Parametricism will enable a further consolidation and evolution of digital practices.

KAPSARC – Tensile Fabric Building Skin

Zaha Hadid Architects and Arup have designed an iconic building in Riyadh Saudi Arabia known as the King Abdullah Petroleum Research Centre. Various departmental edifices are formed into a contiguous closed architecture by spanning the ‘streets’ and ‘courtyards’ between the buildings with translucent, double-skin membrane cells.The concept is to provide shade and ventilation without obscuring light or allowing direct penetration of sunshine. The resulting structural skin is an intelligently arranged composite of steel and fabric, random and organic in appearance and with a daring sculptural form.The challenge to the engineering team was to harness a repeatable structural strategy across a large range of varied geometries. The challenge to the form-finding and patterning team lay in creating a large family of coherent shapes of conical membranes where within each cell there is very varied pre-stress and graded compensation required. The challenge to the membrane provider was to identify a glass-PTFE fabric that would provide the translucency and strength required by the architect's demanding specification. The challenge in fabrication and installation was to produce the extreme shapes and set them perfectly on site.This paper will illustrate how these challenges were successfully met.

Technological Transitions, Industrial Innovations and the Marching Chinese Urban Revolution: An Interview with Jerry Ku and Philip Vernon of E‐Grow, Shanghai

How scalable are current manufacturing and production techniques? What might their application be in the mass‐customised city? Specialist material fabricator E‐Grow is based in Shanghai, from where it has collaborated with premier cutting‐edge architects such as Gehry Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects and Morphosis on the delivery internationally of unique building parts. To find out more about the innovative work that E‐Grow are undertaking in the field of computer‐controlled material production, Guest‐Editor Tom Verebes interviewed its CEO Jerry Ku and design engineer Philip Vernon.

To a Curator of Beautiful and Healthy Lives: A Note to Myself

How might architectural thinking and processes shift over the next 35 years? How might the architect's role be redefined with shifting ethical values? Could the architect be viewed as less of a design professional and more of a curator engaged in the development of healthy holistic environments, catering for all of society's needs? DaeWha Kang, an architect from 2050, writes to his earlier self, critiquing the work that he undertook in independent practice and as a design director at Zaha Hadid Architects in the mid‐2010s. He describes how his design methodologies have evolved in the intervening years.

Anamnesis of Uninhabitedness: what caused the emptiness of Zaha Hadid’s residential building in Vienna

Anamnesis of Uninhabitedness: what caused the emptiness of Zaha Hadid’s residential building in Vienna

Anamnesis of Uninhabitedness: what caused the emptiness of Zaha Hadid’s residential building in Vienna

Anamnesis of Uninhabitedness: what caused the emptiness of Zaha Hadid’s residential building in Vienna

The Parametric Design Genealogy of Zaha Hadid

This study examines Zaha Hadid′s design methodology with a chronological assessment of her work and its roots in parametric design. Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher1 pursue Parametricism, and have executed a series of projects that embody it. Her recent work however, does not show building geometry influenced by paintings that can be found in her early work. This study reinterprets the paintings of Malevich, an originator of Suprematism who is believed to inspire her early work from the perspective of Gestalt psychology with parametric observation within the discourse of Parametricism in order to discover consistent design approaches throughout her practice. By investigating her inspiration from Malevich in her early work to her more recent parametric design approach, Zaha Hadid′s consistent design methodology within the evolution of her work is investigated.

Contemporary architecture of Lebanon

The paper presents selected issues on architecture in Lebanon during the 60 years of existence this State starting from 1943. The outstanding Polish modernist architect Charles Schayer, was very important person for shaping the architectural identity in Lebanon, we presented one of his works – Dar Al Sayad building from 1954. The Cathedral in Harrisa by Pierre El Khoury, Mohammad Al Amin Mosque in Beirut by Azmi Fakhuri and Resistance Museum in Mleeta, are characteristic public buildings for 3 major Lebanese religious groups: Maronite, Sunni and Shiite. The Reconstruction of downtown Beirut after the civil war in the years 1975–1990 and the role of the company Solidere in this endeavor, is shown in the following part of the work. It presents for example design of the New Beirut Souks by Rafael Moneo, the work of sculptors and landscape architects such as Xavier Corbero and Vladimir Djurovic, as well as a discussion related to the recent execution of Steven Holl design called Zaitunay Bay and its impact on designed in the 30’s of the XX century, the Hotel St. Georges designed by August Perret. Next on selected examples of Zaha Hadid designs and Bernard Khoury presents the architecture of the Christian East Beirut and Muslim West Beirut. Finally at the end of the work presents the realization Fair in Tripoli called Rashid Karami designed by Oscar Niemeyer and architectural experimentation in the region of Mount Lebanon.

Public Art and Copyright Law: How the Public Nature of Architecture Changes Copyright Protection

The creation of tangible copies from a work of art that is publicly displayed had always been a rare practice, until some recent cases attracted huge media attention. Zaha Hadid’s Wangjing Soho being pirated in Chongqing and the Chinese copy of the UNESCO-protected Austrian town of Halstatt have officially marked the entrance into the age of repeatability for architecture. This article reads this message through the lens of copyright law and introduces the category of “public art” as copyright subject matter. In particular, it examines the underpinning of private and public interests and suggests that, as public art is born to be displayed in public spaces and to “exist” in a single copy, the author–owner–society relationship becomes exceptionally puzzling. It is this last relationship that modifies how architecture is protected under copyright law and how, therein, the balance between private and public interest is struck.

Pratiques et représentations dans la conception des intérieurs chez Matali Crasset et Zaha Hadid

Nous nous proposons d’etudier l’espace de conception en prenant comme exemple la demarche d’une designer et celle d’une architecte a travers leurs productions des espaces de chambres d’hotels, qui sont respectivement Matali Crasset et Zaha Hadid. Une designer qu’on reconnait, orientee vers le projet, et une architecte reconnue par son empreinte a travers ses objets. L’etude se base sur le travail de rapprochement effectue par Philippe Boudon entre architecturologie et semiotique. Elle fait appel a l’architecturologie pour comprendre les mecanismes cognitifs de la conception a partir de l’espace concu, en l’occurrence une materialisation de ses operations et en tant que tel, c’est un ensemble de signes indiciels du travail du concepteur. Ainsi, l’utilisation de l’approche semiotique permettra d’interpreter le sens de la production et de decrire les relations entre les demarches conceptuelles et leurs resultats.

On Designerization of Media Culture in the Age of Software

On Designerization of Media Culture in the Age of Software

'자하하디드'와 그의 설계안이 동대문디자인플라자에 관한 대중담론에 미치는 영향

A building impacts the society as the society influences a building. From this point of view, the study collected thousands of blog texts about Dongdaemun Design Plaza and conducted semantic network analysis on the basis of co-occurrences of words to examine the impact of 'Zaha Hadid' and her design on the public discourse about DDP. The analysis reached the conclusions as follows. First, 19% of the people who mentioned DDP on the blog were aware of Zaha Hadid as an architect of the building. That owed exposure in the press. Second, her publicity didn't expanded to the other architects' publicity. Third, ordinary activities like eating and taking photos and watching exhibitions as major discourses on the blogs about DDP were generally found on the blogs about other buildings. Fourth, the people who visited DDP showed an exceptional behavior describing the unsual form of the building. Last, the experience of DDP didn't extend to historical and geographical context.

Modernity Beyond the West: A Review of Kathleen James-Chakraborty’s Architecture Since 1400

With Architecture Since 1400 another volume has been added to the list of authoritative surveys of architectural history published in recent years. With 30 bit-like chapters and some 300 illustrations, this book is an ambitious attempt to write a global history of architecture that focuses on the arrival of modernity. The central idea of this survey is the shift away from the Weberian approach that views modernization as emanating from the West. Instead, in this book modern architecture is rewritten according to a global approach that allows for multiple perspectives in a multipolar world. This decentring approach is also pivotal for other parts of the book. For example, there is the much-needed effort to include women in the canon. In addition, the author exchanges a stylistic history for a social history and combines this with a narrative that maps the agents of the built environment, thus complementing the narrative of the genius-architect with that of the role played by clients, patrons and critics. In this way, Lina Bo Bardi or Zaha Hadid not only take their place next to Le Corbusier or Brunelleschi, but in addition Eleanor of Toledo is mentioned as an influential sixteenth-century ruler next to her husband Cosimo I, and Hardwick Hall in England is now considered the outcome of the cooperation between the architect Robert Smythson and the landowner Bess of Hardwick.

XXI CENTURY. FEATURES OF FORMATION OF SPACE BORDERS IN ARCHITECTURE AND TOWN PLANNING

The concept of spatial boundaries is presented as the joints of the two states of the space. The interaction of inside and outside space in contemporary architecture is presented. The features of the boundaries between inside and outside spaces and their possible applications in the architectural objects are considered. Interaction of inside and outside space in architecture can be traced in the works of Toyo Ito, Sou Fujimoto, Kotaro Ide, Jurgen Mayer, Shuhei Endo, Emilio Ambaz, Michael Sorkin, Massimiliano Fuksas, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid. In contemporary architecture the problems of symbiosis of the inside and outside space are successfully solved by such world-renowned architectural companies as Tezuka, SeARC, RSie(n), Formwerkz, Sansiri, FOA, SHoP, UN Studio, NOX.