Author Description

"Zaha Hadid's highly inventive and seemingly unbuildable designs have always defied conventional ideas of architectural space and construction. The BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Germany, a recent addition to her visionary, gravity-defying, fearlessly bold, and rapidly increasing body of built work, succeeds in creating space through lines of motion. The heart of the BMW factory complex, the Central Building is the dynamic focal point of the entire plant that visually, physically, and experientially sustains a sense of animation. With the constant movement supplied by employees, visitors, and automobiles and its audacious, abstracted geometry of forms and lines, the structure challenges the notion of building as a static art." "Zaha Hadid, the 2004 Pritzker Prize Laureate and the first woman to receive the honor, is celebrated for her unbuilt works as well as her built works, including the Phaeno Science Center (Wolfsburg, Germany), Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art (Cincinnati, Ohio), Bergisel Ski Jump (Innsbruck, Austria), and Vitra Fire Station (Weil am Rhein, Germany)."--Jacket.