Zaha Hadid

Nuragic and Contemporary Art Museum in Cagliari, Italy

"describe your style as a good friend of
yours might describe it
Virtuoso of elegance. Personal investigation, research, it's laden with so many ideas that one cannot extrude a single one, there is no formal repertoire. Can I explain this?
Two years ago I focused on one apartment to see how many variations you can come up with in a given space with the same parameters. I would work on this repeatedly for days and you see that there is maybe seven hundred options for one space. This exercise gives you an idea of the degree at which you can interoperate the organization of space, it's not infinite but it's very large. Imagine if you multiply that to the scale of a bigger space, and then to the scale of a city. It's like a pianist constantly practicing - it's the same level of intensity. It increases the repertoires immensely, - it's unpredictable. Some people really live and work within the same doctrine, the same diagram with the same logic. We produce many diagrams to start with and that's why we have a large repertoire." (designboom met zaha hadid in cologne on january 16th, 2007, www.designboom.com)

In 2004, Hadid became the first female recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. www.zaha-hadid.com