Zaha Hadid

Born in 1950 in Iraq, architect Zaha Hadid is known for her unusually keen, but unfortunately seldom realized architectural designs. After studying Mathematics in Beirut, she enrolled at the London Architectural Association, which was in those days, the most radical architecture school. One of her teachers was the Dutchman, Rem Koolhaas, who made her partner of his Office for Metropolitan Architecture after her studies in 1977. The young Zaha Hadid did not stay long. Koolhaas described her as "a planet with its own orbit". At first, she was unable to find contractors who wanted to realize her deconstructivist designs and their bold shapes. For years, she had the reputation as one of the most awarded but never built architects in the world.

Her international fame followed at the end of the 1980s, after participating in the exhibition "Deconstructivist Architecture" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2004, she received the renowned Pritzker Award as the first and only woman for the Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati and made contemporary architectural history. Since then, she has seen a large wave of support, and Hadid's projects are being exhibited worldwide, one show continuously after the other. In the last two years, large retrospectives of her work were exhibited at the Guggenheim, New York and Berlin, the Hara Museum Tokyo, the Singapore Art Museum and the Design Museum in London. Art Affair is showing you a - Germany exclusive - collection of furniture pieces by Zaha Hadid.

Awards/Projects

1986 Internationale Bauausstellung'in Berlin; 1992/1993 Düsseldorf Art and Media centre; 1994 Cardiff Bay Opera House; 1996 Thames Water / Royal Academy Habitable Bridge Competition; 1998 the Commission to Design the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio; 1999 Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea, Rome; 2004 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Exhibits

1976 - 77 Student Show, Architetural Association, London; 1978 OMA: The Sparkling Metropolis Solomon R.; 1983 Retrospective at the architectural association, London; 1978 the Guggenheim Museum, New York; 1985 the GA gallery, Tokyo; 1988 the Deconstructivist Architecture show at MoMA; 1988 Metropolis, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; 1992 The Great Utopia, Guggenheim Museum, New York; 1995 the graduate school of design at Harvard University; 1995 Grand Central Station New York; 1996 Paper Art, Leopold-Hösch Museum, Düren; 1996 Wishmachine, Kunsthalle Vienna; 1996 Master's Section, Palazzo Grassi, Venice Biennale; 1997/1998 the San Francisco MoMA; 1997 - 2000 Mind Zone, Millennium Dome, London; 2000 Sawaya & Moroni, Milan; 2000 State Museum of Architecture, Moscow; 2000 ICA institute of contemporary arts, London; 2000 Venice Architecture Biennale / Italian, Austrian and UK pavilion; 2000 Villa Medici, Rome; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; 2002 - 03 Zaha Hadid Laboratory, Price Tower Arts Center, Bartlesville, Oklahoma; 2002 Opere e Progetti, Centro Nazionale per le ArtiContemporanee, Rome; 2002 City of Towers, Venice Biennale; 2005 Paintings, Kenny Schachter ROVE, London; 2005 - 06 Prairie Skyscraper; 2005 Elastika, intervention at Design 05, Art Basel Miami Beach; 2005 25 Years of the Deutsche Bank Collection, Guggenheim Museum, Berlin

Collections:

MoMA New York; MoMA San Francisco; Deutsches Architektur Museum, Frankfurt; The Getty Center in Los Angeles;