Zaha Hadid in Chicago

Now that I'm working more and more with fabric, I really enjoyed getting to see Zaha Hadid’s new pavilion, a summer-long fixture of Millennium Park, while in Chicago. Hadid, the first woman to win architecture’s Pritzker Prize, was born in Baghdad in 1950 and set up her London-based practice in 1980.

From an article in the Wall Street Journal by Kelly Crow:

For Chicago, she says she (Hadid) thought about how tension alters the look of fabric as it is pulled taut or twisted. The result: an elliptical building with strategic gashes to let in light and pod-like openings that people can pass through. Her design includes diagonal lines, a nod to Burnham’s 1909 city plan which famously laid out a fanned grid of streets diagonally from Chicago’s city center out into the suburbs.

The physical complexity of the project quickly overwhelmed local contractors. Aaron Helfman, president of TenFab, an Evanston, Ill., company that designs trade-show booths, says it took nearly five months and several structural engineers. The addition of a 400-pound projection screen, for example, upset the math because the whole structure was so lightweight.

Another upside is that it can be dismantled and reassembled in less than a week’s time.