Tag Archives: Zaha Hadid

Art & Design Essays: ‘Will AI Wipe Out Architects?’

The bleeding edge … LookX uses a piece of crumpled paper as a prompt to create buildings in the style of Frank Gehry (left) and Zaha Hadid (right).
The bleeding edge … LookX uses a piece of crumpled paper as a prompt to create buildings in the style of Frank Gehry (left) and Zaha Hadid (right). Composite: Tim Fu

It’s revolutionizing building – but could AI kill off an entire profession? Perhaps not, finds our writer, as he enters a world where Corbusier-style marvels and 500-room hotels are just a click away

Oliver Wainwright

Oliver WainwrightThe Guardian (August 7, 2023): A handful of little green blocks flashes up on the screen, filling a building site with a neat grid of uniform cubes. One second they form rows of towers, next they morph into low-rise courtyards, then they flip back into long slender slabs, before cycling through hundreds of other iterations, in a hypnotic high-speed ballet of bristling buildings.

“You don’t even have to do much” … Patrik Schumacher-generated designs for ZHA using Midjourney.
“You don’t even have to do much” … Patrik Schumacher-generated designs for ZHA using Midjourney. Photograph: Zaha Hadid Architects

I watch this while on a Zoom call with Wanyu He, an architect based in Shenzhen, China, and the founder of XKool, an artificial intelligence company determined to revolutionise the architecture industry. She freezes the dancing blocks and zooms in, revealing a layout of hotel rooms that fidget and reorder themselves as the building swells and contracts. Corridors switch sides, furniture dances to and fro. Another click and an invisible world of pipes and wires appears, a matrix of services bending and splicing in mesmerising unison, the location of lighting, plug sockets and switches automatically optimised. One further click and the construction drawings pop up, along with a cost breakdown and components list. The entire plan is ready to be sent to the factory to be built.

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AI/Design 2023: ‘Architect-Style Cars’ By Moss & Fog

Moss & Fog (February 2023) – What if they designed cars, as well as buildings? Would they look like the architect’s famous creations? Would the car embody their trademark style?

We’ve enlisted AI to help us explore the ‘what if?‘. We used the program MidJourney to help visualize what an architect-derived car might look like. It was a fun visual journey, creating images that fit the time period and overall style of the famous architect in question.

Frank Lloyd Wright  (1867-1959)

Zaha Hadid  (1950-2016)

Eero Saarinen  (1910-1961)

Antoni Gaudí  (1852-1926)

New Architecture Books: ‘Contemporary Houses’ – 100 Homes Over 2 Decades

This publication rounds up 100 of the world’s most interesting and pioneering homes designed in the past two decades, featuring a host of talents both new and established, including John Pawson,Shigeru BanTadao AndoZaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Daniel Libeskind, Alvaro Siza, and Peter Zumthor.

Accommodating daily routines of eating, sleeping, and shelter, as well as offering the space for personal experience and relationships, this is architecture at its most elementary and its most intimate.

Designing private residences has its own very special challenges and nuances for the architect. The scale may be more modest than public projects, the technical fittings less complex than an industrial site, but the preferences, requirements, and vision of particular personalities becomes priority. The delicate task is to translate all the emotive associations and practical requirements of “home” into a workable, constructed reality.

The author

Philip Jodidio studied art history and economics at Harvard, and edited Connaissance des Arts for over 20 years. His TASCHEN books include the Architecture Now! series and monographs on Tadao Ando, Santiago Calatrava, Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban, Richard Meier, and Zaha Hadid.

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Top Ecological Design: “Roatán Próspera” In Honduras Designed By Zaha Hadid Architects

Zaha Hadid ArchitectsThe first residential units on Roatán Próspera are a case study in local sustainability and global integration. Combining the most advanced modular construction techniques with sustainably-sourced local materials, the design and planning for the first dwellings in Próspera is a tangible example of the dramatic shift in development methodologies taking place around the world. 

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The people of neighboring settlements will take part in construction and management and part of the purchase of each residence goes toward the construction of a sister residence in the neighboring community.

Roatán Próspera rethinks the whole design and conventional delivery approach to development, starting from understanding the local supply chain, logistics, energy and economical aspects as a basis to engage technologically-curious, ecologically-minded, entrepreneurial building contractors. Local labor and methods are engaged for construction methodologies and logistics of supply, procurement, and assembly in Roatán.

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New Architecture Books: “Zaha Hadid – Complete Works” (Taschen)

Zaha Hadid was a revolutionary architect. For years, she was widely acclaimed and won numerous prizes despite building practically nothing. Some even said her work was simply impossible to build. Yet, during the latter years of her life, Hadid’s daring visions became a reality, bringing a new and unique architectural language to cities and structures such as the Port House in Antwerp, the Al Janoub Stadium near Doha, Qatar, and the spectacular new airport terminal in Beijing.

TASCHEN

By her untimely death in 2016, Hadid was firmly established among architecture’s finest elite, working on projects in Europe, China, the Middle East, and the United States. She was the first female architect to win both the Pritzker Prize for architecture and the prestigious RIBA Royal Gold Medal, with her long-time Partner Patrik Schumacher now the leader of Zaha Hadid Architects and in charge of many new projects.

Based on the massive TASCHEN monograph, this book is now available in an extensively updated and accessible edition covering Hadid’s complete works, including ongoing projects. With abundant photographs, in-depth sketches, and Hadid’s own drawings, the volume traces the evolution of her career, spanning not only her most pioneering buildings but also the furniture and interior designs that were integrated into her unique, and distinctly 21st-century, universe.

The author

Philip Jodidio studied art history and economics at Harvard, and edited Connaissance des Arts for over 20 years. His TASCHEN books include the Architecture Now! series and monographs on Tadao Ando, Santiago Calatrava, Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban, Richard Meier, and Zaha Hadid.

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