The writer of this article had lunch with Hadid at the Mercer in New York’s SoHo. Hadid’s sandwich came with wavy waffle potato chips, and Hadid examined one before putting it in her mouth.
The twisty geometry of an ordinary potato chip, to say nothing of the curves in modern cars and phones, is a reminder of how few buildings look as if they belong to the digital world. Hadid is devoted to helping architecture catch up. Walls are never quite vertical, floors rarely remain flat for long and the twain meet not in ninety-degree angles but, rather, in the kind of curves one finds in skateboard parks. Hadid’s largest completed building to date, the National Museum of the XXI Century Arts, or MAXXI, in Rome, opened in November. For an architect so celebrated, Hadid’s output is relatively small.
She has completed thirteen structures: these include the Vitra Fire Station, in Weil am Rhein (1992); a train station in Strasbourg (2001); a ski jump in Innsbruck, with an attached restaurant (2002); the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, in Cincinnati (2003); the Phaeno Science Center, in Wolfsburg, Germany (2005); the BMW Plant Central Building, in Leipzig (2005); and MAXXI, in Rome (2009). There is no single Hadid style, although one can detect a watermark in her buildings’ futuristic smoothness. She has forty-five architectural projects under way. The global recession seems barely to have affected her office, which is in London.
Hadid was born into a wealthy family in Baghdad, in 1950, and she grew up at a time when Iraq’s capital was a secular, cosmopolitan, progressive city. Tells about her childhood there and her education in England and Switzerland. She attended the American University in Beirut and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Discusses being taught by Rem Koolhaas during her student years and her interest in the Russian avant-garde, in particular the ideas of Kazimir Malevich. In her final year at the A.A., Hadid won the Diploma Prize for her portfolio, which included “Malevich’s Tektonik,” a fourteen-story hotel that stretches over London’s Hungerford Bridge.
Then the writer attends the Frieze Art Fair with Hadid. He describes Hadid’s first completed building, the Vitra Fire Station and tells about the controversy around her plan for the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales, which was ultimately scrapped. Discusses how developments in computer modeling have facilitated Hadid’s designs. He also tells about the Phaeno Science Center and the BMW plant building. Then he attends the official opening of the ‘MAXXI’. At a dinner in Hadid’s honor, the writer asks the contractor what it had been like to work on the MAXXI. “Very dee-fee-cult,” he answered.
Read the full article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/12/21/091221fa_fact_seabrook#ixzz0aRT4CeRt
