Zaha Hadid - Dream Builder

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2016

⏱️ 54 minutes

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Summary

Zaha Hadid was the first woman and first Muslim to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honour. She designed the whale-like London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics Games and the extraordinary Maaxi Museum in Rome. Her designs were challenging and innovative and she was at the forefront of changing tastes in architecture and design today. After years of failing to get her designs built, her distinctive work became highly sought after, all over the world from Germany to the USA and from China to Iraq. Zaha Hadid talked to Razia Iqbal and an audience in London at the Royal Institute of British Architects about her work and the future of architecture. This programme was orginally broadcast in June 2013.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading from the BBC.
0:04.0	For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to BBCWorld
0:09.0	Service.com slash podcasts. Thank you very much indeed and a very warm welcome from the Royal Institute of British
0:28.6	Architects in London where we are about to meet the creator of the Aquatic Center for the 2012 London Olympics,
0:36.0	the Cincinnati Museum of Modern Art, and the extraordinary Guanjo Opera House, to name only a few. Our guest is the only architect to have won our
0:45.4	Host's Architecture prize, the Sterling Prize, two years in succession and this is
0:50.7	really giving the game away in such a male-dominated profession, the first woman to have ever won the Pritzker Prize architecture's equivalent of the Nobel.
0:59.0	Since she won that award, she has embarked on an amazing period of creativity, whether it's schools, science
1:06.0	centers, office buildings or factories.
1:09.0	It seems the whole world wants one of her complex avant-garde landscape-defining buildings.
1:15.2	Her practice has expanded to deliver projects in Singapore, Salerno, Moscow, Monpeleier,
1:20.8	Abu Dhabi, Azerbaijan and many other places besides.
1:24.2	All this from someone who, for much of her career, was described as a paper architect,
1:30.4	someone whose beautiful designs and challenging ideas were thought to be all but unbuildable.
1:36.4	She was born in Iraq and has made her home here in London.
1:40.0	Please welcome the inimitable Zaha Hadid. Zaha I want to start by talking to you about one of your most recent buildings, the Guangzhou Opera House.
1:58.0	It's in the city once called Canton and we'll have special resonance I think for you for reasons we shall come to later in the
2:05.2	interview. It lies low against the Pearl Harp River with towers behind it and a huge
2:10.3	asymmetric 1800 CETA theatre which is curvy and molded. I think almost grotto like
2:17.8	how would you describe it? Well I mean the space inside is kind of like an oyster or like a grotto, but more like an oyster maybe.
2:29.0	And asymmetry, we didn't test it for the in Cardiff, but the idea of asymmetry, the idea was to
2:37.6	intensify the sound or make the sound more interesting.
	...

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