Zaha Hadid (1950–2016)

Architekturpreis: Zaha Hadid©M. Cremer

Prize winner

Milestones in architectural history are oftern dwarfish buildings. It was not the grand symphonies of the cathedrals and palaces that have inspired the history of ideas but the chamber musical building forms. Even in the case of a fire station for a furniture factory in the state of Baden, its creator Zaha M. Hadid has at once realized her ambitious, almost presumptuous architectural concept. Zaha Hadid is the most rigorous embodiment of a new spirit in architecture which simultaneously opposes late and post-modernism, high-tech and high-touch positions. The motive of this architecture is neither the rediscovery of history nor the beginning of a new modesty, neither the historistic cult of the dead nor the purist migration of the souls, but the foundation of an independent formal language free of imitations and utterly contemporaneous.”

Michael Mönninger