“It’s Going to Take a Little Zaha”

Architizer News

“It’s Going to Take a Little Zaha”

November 7, 2011

California Residence. All images: Zaha Hadid Architects

A recent (and hilarious) advertisement for Quicken Loans features a youthful Magic Johnson atop a building in downtown Detroit chucking android cellphones cross-country (Alaska, Georgia), all with only a flick of the wrist and the grace of a fadeaway. Replace Magic with Zaha Hadid, and you pretty much get the spectacle that has been the year of Zaha. One can imagine the two-time Stirling award winning architect catapulting projects from the top of some anonymous tower in London throughout the world, from China to Russia, Scotland to France, with her partner-and-theoretician extraordinaire Patrik Schumacher feeding her passes.

Today’s news comes from La Jolla, California, where a Zaha-designed house has been given the clear to begin construction, and from the U.A.E., which saw the completion of the architect’s first bridge design earlier this year. More after the break.

As Architect’s Newspaper reports, the La Jolla planning commission finally gave the go-ahead for Zaha Hadid Architects and San Diego-based firm Public to commence construction of the 12,700 square-foot-house. Designed in 2003, the project has been in deadlock with the community planning association which sought to bar its realization citing zoning and ordinance violations. The commission’s approval has been derided by the association as “100 percent politics.”

Hadid’s website describes the house as an “introverted sculptural structure” characterized by sweeping curves and a gestural roofline, which marks the divide between the interior and exterior. The wing-shaped house, which will have four bedrooms, six bathrooms, and an indoor pool, echoes the soaring, atmospheric forms of Richard Neutra, whose modernist retreats have been canonized as the California hill-top pleasure-homes par excellence.

The Sheikh Zayed Bridge. Photo: Zaha Hadid Architects

The firm has also released images of the newly-completed Sheikh Zayed Bridge in Adu Dhabi. The 842 meter-long (2,762 feet) bridge, which acts as a gateway to Abu Dhabi Island, features a “sinusoidal waveform” with large arches–the tallest of which is 60 meters (197 feet) high–rising above and falling below the road deck. The reasons for the belated media release are fuzzy, as is the logic that an exuberant bridge would act as a “catalyst in the future urban growth of Abu Dhabi.” Oh well.