“I believe that every project should have a very strong idea,” the iconic architect Zaha Hadid told Alexa, in what would be one of her final interviews, just three days before her death last month at the age of 65.
She was discussing her first New York City building: the 11-story, High Line-adjacent luxury condo 520 West 28th Street, expected to welcome its first residents at the end of this year or early next.
It will now stand among her final creations.
In the case of that forthcoming building, she told us she focused on “involving the cityscape in the domain of [the] project . . . I was fascinated by the idea of the extension of the pavement. You walk into the Guggenheim, and the pavement extends all the way to the top. This idea of fluid lines can impact the scale of the building, how it looks, how it impacts the interior.
“I always thought the building should have a connection to the High Line. It should project out, make some sort of gesture. When you have a neighborhood that is quite fresh and new,” she concluded, “it can give you certain freedom to do new things.”
Glorious, soaring freedom is something Hadid consistently captured in her revolutionary buildings.
The Iraqi-born, London-based architect expanded the possibilities of contemporary design as much as, if not more than, any architect working today. Featuring sensual curvatures, overlapping layers and ultra-sharp angles that often made her schemes feel as much like sculpture as architecture, Hadid spent much of her career seeing her avant-garde designs go unrealized.
Those that were, however — Rome’s Maxxi contemporary art museum (2009); Guangzhou, China’s opera house (2010); the London Olympics aquatics arena (2011); a cultural center in Baku, Azerbaijan (2012) — earned the greatest of accolades. Hadid became the first woman to win architecture’s prestigious Pritzker Prize, and the first to receive its British equivalent, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal, on her own.
“Her form-making broke boundaries,” says architect Deborah Berke, who this summer will become dean of Yale’s architecture school, where Hadid frequently taught. “Her buildings were so utterly unexpected, they opened opportunities for architects and students around the world to reconsider what architecture can be.”
“She created a new language of form,” agrees Tanzanian-born British architect David Adjaye, whose Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture will open in Washington, DC, in September. “I have long delighted in following her architecture and her work. She drew on her own force of spirit, distinct vision and indomitable character, all of which are present in her buildings.”
The instinct and ability to innovate were part of Hadid’s design DNA, whether she was creating a cagelike silver bracelet, a swooping resin bench or a skyline-defining structure.
As New York-based architect Lee Mindel tells Alexa: “She seemed to defy gravity — to transcend enclosure, and make space a pure art form.”