The Second of Three Women

Zaha Hadid is a Bagdad-born, London-based architect. She is celebrated for her works that include the Vitra Fire Station, in Weil am Rhein, Germany (1994); the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, in Cincinnati (2003) and MAXXI, in Rome (2009). She is known for her abstract drawings and paintings – where abstraction is the best way to capture multiple perspectives in two dimensions, and to bring them together in a “distortion field.” Hadid is a graduate of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and founder of the 300 person, London based, Zaha Hadid Architects.

The December 21 & 28, 2009 issue of The New Yorker contains an interesting profile of Hadid with the following observation regarding engineering:

Still, there remained the problem of engineering: how to actually build Hadid’s visions. Architects, it has been said, don’t build; they draw. And translating her designs for fabricators and contractors had always been the sticking point in Hadid’s practice. One reason she remained in Britain (she became a British citizen in 1989) was the extraordinary ingenuity of British engineers, a tradition that goes back to the Victorian era, when they created such engineering masterpieces as the Crystal Place (originally erected in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition in 1851), and Paddington Station (1854). Early in her practice, she realized that civil engineers, who build roads and bridges, had much to offer her, because in civil engineering the materials employed in realizing the design often serve as the supporting structures themselves. (In a concrete roadway, for example, structure, shape, and surface are all created by the same material.) Structural engineers were also important to her, none more so than Peter Rice, the Northern Irish engineer who helped erect the Sydney Opera House and the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, whom she met and collaborated with in the nineteen-eighties. Although their collaboration did not result in any buildings, “he taught me that engineering is essentially common sense.”