In continuation with a video series honoring the great Zaha Hadid — who passed away unexpectedly on March 31 of this year at age 69 — Architizer met with Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, who discusses his discovery of Hadid’s early paintings and first projects.
“I started studying architecture in 1993 and of course stumbled upon some of Zaha’s paintings,” he begins. “She hadn’t built much back then, and these paintings looked like these amazing fantasies.”
Earlier this year, Architizer wrote in depth about Zaha’s abstract paintings, shedding light on both Hadid’s inspirations and design process as well as her irrefutable talent for achieving in her buildings the visions she exuded in these fantastical visions.
As Ingels comments, the acrylic paintings often “looked like they came straight out of the future or a computer.” In fact, it was an attraction to geometry and mathematics that pushed Hadid to imagine these landscapes and later formulate them in the shape of her buildings. As founder and principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, Hadid communicated architectural visions through her paintings, where geometrical forms seemed to fuse at an infinite speed.
Early study paintings for the Vitra Fire Station © Zaha Hadid Architects
“Zaha was probably presented to me as an example of a paper architect,” explains Ingels, “making these wonderful but also unbuildable fantasies about buildings.”
It wasn’t until Ingels visited Vitra in Weil am Rhein as a second-year architecture student — where he saw Hadid’s Fire Station — that he became aware of her deep understanding of architecture.
Entrance of the Vitra Fire Station © Zaha Hadid Architects; photograph by Hélène Binet
She had somehow found a way to manifest in physical form the often impossible perspectives of floating elements and skewed angles that she had captured in her fantasy. The visit stood out to Ingels as an eye-opening experience because of the fact that “something so wildly out of your imagination could actually be so perfectly materialized into the real world.”
Bjarke Ingels; Portrait by Architizer
At 41, Bjarke Ingels is founder and creative partner of BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group, the firm responsible for this year’s Serpentine Pavilion in London as well as various museums and mixed-use projects around the world, which you can explore on BIG’s Architizer firm profile.
Make sure to watch some of the previous videos in this exclusive series, presented in collaboration with Dezeen, including conversations with Richard Rogers and Norman Foster and look out for upcoming interviews featuring Daniel Libeskind and Amanda Levete.
Cover image: Vitra Fire Station by Zaha Hadid Architects; photograph © Wojtek Gurak