The Queen of the Curve, as Zaha Hadid is popularly known among her growing community of admirers around the world, is expanding her sway in Asia, opening the horizon wider for a graceful, refreshing, yet amazingly energetic new transformation of its urban landscape. Having turned heads and conquered the minds of planners and developers with her wildly stunning designs in China and South Korea, she's now ready to capture the Japanese with her spell, winning the bid to build the main stadium for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.
Hadid, 62, the Iraqi-born British architect whom fellow architects describe as "a planet in her own unmistakable orbit" and "the raw force of nature," fought off competition from 45 other companies with a design so fluid and sleek that it almost seems to vibrate with dynamism, lending a staid Tokyo neighbourhood, Shinjuku, a sudden burst of life. What has impressed the judges most are its elongated shape that gives the structure the look of a space ship coming into land, its flaring lines covered by translucent membranes that make the most of natural light while expanding the openness of the interior space, its retractable roofing, plus flexible seating arrangements that can be adjusted for a wide variety of year-round sporting and cultural activities, not just for one-time events such as the Olympics.
As Tadao Ando, chairman of the competition selection panel, explains, "The design will give Tokyo a lasting legacy well beyond the 2020 Olympic Games. I believe the stadium will become a shrine for world sport for the next 100 years." Hadid herself describes her design in these words: "The unique structure is both light and cohesive, defining a silhouette that integrates with the city. The perimeter of the stadium will be an inhabited bridge, a continuous exhibition space that creates an exciting new journey for visitors."
"An exciting journey" is perhaps the best way to describe Hadid's works since urban planners in Asia and around the world find in the fluidity of her architecture an excellent, almost magical, way to break down urban monotony and recreate the urban landscape. She plays with buildings like a sculptor plays with clay, bending, twisting and layering them in sudden flights of fancy, producing curves that advance and retreat and rise and fall in dramatic imitations of flowing water and blowing wind. As a result, her creations are as exciting to look at from outside as they are from inside. It's like exploring a new world where nothing is expected and every bend brings on a new surprise.
Three years ago, the Guangzhou Opera House in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong became the first major Hadid work to hit the Asian landscape and was universally acclaimed as an iconic architectural wonder. The New York Times described it as "the most alluring opera house built anywhere in the world in decades… gorgeous to look at… a magnificent example of how a single building can redeem a moribund urban environment". Jutting out of its riverside location like two gleaming pieces of diamond, it radiates a sense of bodies in motion, bringing life to empty spaces around it.
The transforming power of Hadid's architecture is equally evident in a new office, retail, and entertainment complex, called Galaxy Soho that opened recently in the heart of Beijing. Its four, 67-metre high towers form continuous flowing volumes that coalesce to create an internal world of open space without corners or abrupt transitions. The experience is enveloping and immersive. It's a 360-degree world that constantly changes its contours, fusing, pulling apart, and generating a sense of high drama and fierce movement.
Two other projects under construction in Asia, besides many others completed or ongoing in Europe and West Asia, reinforce the relevance of this magical architect in a rapidly urbanising world, who won the prestigious Pritzker Award, architecture's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, in 2004. One is the Changsha Meixihu International Arts and Cultural Centre, also in China, and the other is Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul. The Changsha centre comprises a cluster of buildings housing a grand theatre, a contemporary art museum, a multipurpose hall, and supportive facilities, each designed as a petal-shaped volume curving around one another to create a central plaza and a series of connecting lawns, terraces and pathways that offer an uplifting urban experience.
The Dongdaemun Design Plaza, due to open in March 2014 and conceived as a learning resource for both specialist designers and the general public, is going to create a refreshing oasis in a congested part of the South Korean capital for leisure, relaxation and refuge. Besides a fashion plaza and an underground mall, this beautiful project features a multi-use park that replaces Dongdaemun's older baseball and soccer stadiums and gives the stark, formal neighbourhood a mellifluous sense of space.
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