Zaha Hadid Named the 42nd Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medalist in Architecture.

by Robin Dripps
February 9, 2007

The selection of Zaha Hadid for this important award is particularly appropriate relative to the recent merger of the disciplines of architecture and landscape architecture and the increased collaborations among all the disciplines within the school.

From the moment that Ms. Hadid surprised the profession with her first prize entry in the Peak competition for Hong Kong in 1983, her work demonstrated new and important ways for architecture to engage the land. Her proposal was much more than a sensitive response to an existing context. Here, it seemed more as if the fundamental geomorphologic structure of the mountainous site had itself been extended and transformed into a hybrid construct merging land and building. This was perhaps the most evocative and fully realized representation of ideas that in other ways had been underway here at the School of Architecture where casual discussion and informal collaborations were also shedding light on ways to rethink the relationship between architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning.

For close to 30 years Ms. Hadid has been exploring through painting and architecture how complex spatial fields can restructure the way sites are engaged and how programmatic relationships can be restructured to be open to larger and more diverse constituencies. Her work has radically redefined how we think about context. Instead of responding to the superficial appearance of surrounding buildings, Ms. Hadid looks to emergent physical and cultural processes that while not so immediately accessible to sight, figure more importantly in the life of a place. In her projects, open networks of movement and ambiguous spatial closure create rich fields that engage multiple layers of an extended urban infrastructure so that building and context support one another. Her Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati and even more so at the soon to be completed MAXXI Museum in Rome, show how aspects of the city previously hidden from public consciousness are revealed and revalued as one participates in these structures.

In 2002 Ms. Hadid was invited to the School of Architecture to participate in the symposium on Ethics and Aesthetics. The organizers considered her project for BMW with its spatial restructuring of the relationships between production and management to be a model for how ethical thinking within the design process is capable of producing work of profound aesthetic beauty.

Ms. Hadid is currently developing urban planning proposals for several major European cites, designing a wide range of cultural institutions around the world, taking on industrial design projects for furniture and entire kitchens, and even rethinking the form of personal transport.

Ms. Hadid’s work has been published extensively and exhibited worldwide with her most recent show being at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2004 she received the Pritzker Prize in Architecture.