Product Description

With her most recent commission, Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center, architect Zaha Hadid becomes the first woman ever to design an American museum. This long awaited frist monograph on one of the world's most important architects collects Hadid's entire oeuvre-more than 80 built and unbuilt projects over 20 years- in one significant volume.Throughout her training at London's Architectural Association, and her work with Rem Koolhaas at OMA, to the establisment of her own worldwide architectural practice, Zaha Hadid has been acclaimed for her vanguard architectonic language. Only a handful of her projects have been built-all to great critcal success- and each new project astonishes the world of design with its commitment to revolutionary forms and ideas. As a result, she has an enormous following of students and practitioners, visionaries and builders.The groundbreaking monograph contains Hadid's own striking drawings and paintings, as well as hundreds of sketches, plans, and models. Readers will recognize her built work-the Vitra Fire Station near Basel and the IBA Building in Berlin- and will welcome details of her competition entry for Chicago's ITT Building, and her winning design for the Cardiff Opera House. With generous commenary by the architect and her office, this is a landmark publication.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #232684 in Books
• Published on: 1998-10-15
• Released on: 1998-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

About the Author
Aaron Betsky is Architecture and Design Curator of San Francisco's Museum Modern Art. He is the author of Violated Perfection (Rizzoli, 1990) and a contributor to Pacific Edge ( Rizzoli, 1998)

Customer Reviews

Good Architecture? What am I looking at!
There is no doubt in my mind that Zaha Hadid is a great architect. Some of the spatial ideas presented in this book are quite appealing, but that's only about 10 or 12 of the pages. What is going on in all the other projects? How do I move through these spaces? The paintings and graphics are cool, but where's the building? Where's the structure? I see how the built stuff is standing, but what about the unbuilt? This is more a criticism of the book than Hadid, since I can't really tell what she's doing in the first place. A lot of this presentation reminds me of when I was in school and people would present a lot of flash and zippy graphics of very rich process, but their building would fall apart with the first step inside the front door (if you could find it in the first place.) I originally got this book to study how to make this dynamic type of architecture work in the real world, but it doesn't take me much further than I was already. If you are very interested in this sort of architecture, don't stop with this book. Check out Frank Gehry: Complete works and anything else with CONSTRUCTION drawings in it, along with the process and the prettys. What makes good designers great is how they make the idea real and workable. I wish I could have seen more of Hadid's solutions better in this book.

If you want to just deal with graphics and ideas, Hollywood might have a place for you.

excellent overview with great imagery
This book allows for either a new comer or seasoned architect to truly begin to understand the intentions of a great architect. The book remarkably shows an in depth look into the process, motivation and presentational work of one of architectures few succesful female architects. The quality of images is very good and thorough. The one area where this book doesn't completely fulfill is built work. The drawings and gestural models are elegant and spatial but can't fully encompass the feeling of the true structure. A more indepth look at actual built spaces would make this book unable to pass up. Despite this flaw, this book is definately one every post-modern architecture fan should add to his/her library.

zaha: imagination and magic
I think this book has more to it than technical drawings could ever give. It's an artistic sight of what and how architecture should be thought and viewed like. Colours, shapes and forms seem to spring out the pages of this book. Go out there and see it four yourself, it's not a book about construction, it's a book about ideas.