Zaha Hadid: Flowing Concrete

Zaha Hadid was born in Baghdad, Iraq. She originally went to a Catholic school when she was little. Her life was very blessed. After Hussein came into power and the war with Iran started her family left Iraq. She took a math course at the American University of Beirut. In 1979 she opened a independent practice in London. Zaha is known for being very single minded. Being very forceful with clients is positive and negative; she loses some clients but then she has only serious clients. One of her projects, called The Peak, won a competition for a club in 1982. In 1995 she considered giving up architecture. To design her buildings and other projects she uses paintings, sketches, drawing, urban plans, competitions, models, relief models, animation,furniture, and design objects. Flow and light are incorporated into all of her projects. Zaha tries to make all of her projects practical and useful. She says her buildings flow just like the Calligraphy of Arabs. Her buildings are rooted in Islamic building traditions. Zaha has taught at Harvard, Yale, and many other universities. She never uses computers to do the original designs of her projects. She is "Particularly attached to concrete."

BMW Plant Central Building
The BMW Plant is the center of the factory. When building this building Zaha tried to add natural light by glazing the roof. The structure consists of scissor sections that connect to the ground. Cars move along the tracks in the ceiling to other parts of the plant. They had to do special research to make sure that the pollutants in the air wouldn't damage the only half built cars as they travel though different parts of the factory.

Taichung Metropolitan Opera House
This project was never actually built. The opera house was submitted to a competition and Zaha came in third. It was designed to have a two thousand seat grand auditorium, a eight hundred seat drama theatre, a two hundred seat black box theatre. All of the the theatres were designed to have grand staircases. There was an internal bridge to connect one side of the opera house to the other. In the original plan the building was supposed to have black granite covering the outside.