Zaha Hadid: BMW Central Building

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 of Contemporary Art (Cincinnati, Ohio), Bergisel Ski Jump (Innsbruck, Austria), and Vitra Fire Station (Weil am Rhein, Germany).

Zaha Hadid / BMW Central Building, the seventh volume in the Source Books in Architecture series, provides a comprehensive look at a contemporary masterpiece that reveals the implementation of an architect's inspiration into reality. The extensive photographic documentation of the construction and finished project is accompanied by an exhaustive graphic presentation of sketches, models, renderings, and working drawings as well as interviews with Hadid that examine both the technical and cultural significance of this important structure.

Published September 1, 2006