Feuerwache weil rhein zaha hadid biography

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This rendered the building partially obsolete, and it was for this reason (and not the rumored error on Hadid's part of not allowing enough room in the building to house fire trucks) that the building is now used by Vitra as a showplace for part of its permanent collection of chairs.

As can be expected, the inside of the building is as imaginative as the outside, with multiple optical tricks being played on the viewer especially in the bathrooms of the downstairs portion of the building.

The inner balance of the curved ribbon windows, the tapering succession of spaces and the projectile-like projections are almost perfect. Other honours include the Republic of France's Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, England's Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Japan's Praemium Imperiale, as well as the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects.

The firehouse thus became part of Vitra's program of building structures by world renowned architects, including Tadao Ando's Conference Pavilion, Frank Gehry's Design Museum and Alvaro Siza's Production Hall.

When in use the firehouse was staffed by volunteers who worked in the Vitra factory.

Fire Station

Zaha Hadid, born in 1950 in Baghdad, studied mathematics at the American University in Beirut and architecture at the Architectural Association in London.

The relatively small structure serves as a showcase for the unusual shapes and angles that architectural critics had admired in her conceptual work throughout the 1980s, with un-built projects such as her winning entry for the Peak International Design Competition for Hong Kong in 1983.

Constructed as a working firehouse within the Vitra furniture design and manufacturing complex (after a fire some years earlier proved the need for such a structure), the building was intended to serve all of Vitra's buildings which at the time fell outside the range of neighboring fire districts.

feuerwache weil rhein zaha hadid biography

At the spot on the first floor where the horizontal and vertical wings meet at their centre of gravity, the architect cunningly leaves a gaping triangular hole in the floor.

This simple fire station makes it clear why architecture can be content neither with the provision of decorated boxes nor with the invocation of the purity of “space” and “light”, if time is forgotten in the process.

In 1982 she won the British Architectural Design Gold Medal for the renovation of a townhouse in Eaton Place, London, succeeded by a first place award for the Peak Club in Hong Kong. The Museum of Modern Art in New York included Hadid's work in a group exhibition with Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley under the title 'Deconstructivist Architecture' in 1988.

After completing her studies, she founded an architectural office in London in 1980 and assumed a teaching position at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. Formerly, the best avant-garde designs were for millionaires’ villas. The rear end of the building also features an interesting connection to Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut, whereby Hadid seems to evoke the front end of a large ship, with its sharp end and exaggerated height.

Zaha Hadid and the fire station for Vitra in Weil am Rhein

As a synthesis of the design of individual buildings and town planning, it brings the urban fabric right into the building.

Her competition entry for a building on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin won another first prize in 1986, followed by exhibitions of her work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the GA Gallery in Tokyo. This is an architecture of speed. However, this highly taut spatial composition can also be understood without any knowledge of the urban services. It creates an inspirational enclosed emptiness as a spiritual projection, a sparkling grindstone with which to sharpen the wits.

Despite its threatening nature, it radiates an invincible optimism, and this is something which is needed if we are to take up the equally bleak and exciting challenges of today’s risk society – even if the challenge is only the next smouldering fire in the wood store of a furniture factory.

Zaha Hadid Architects

Archive:

Weil am Rhein, Germany
1990 – 1993
Vitra International AG
Built
852m²

Conceived as the end-note to existing factory buildings, the Vitra Fire Station defines rather than occupies space – emerging as a linear, layered series of walls, between which program elements are contained – a representation of ‘movement frozen’ – an ‘alert’ structure, ready to explode into action at any moment.

An initial study of the Vitra factory site informed our designs for the Vitra Fire Station – a building conceived as the key element within a linear landscaped zone, the artificial extension of linear patterns in adjacent fields and vineyards – designed as a connecting unit rather than an isolated object; defining rather than occupying space.

The new fire station – long, linear, narrow – emerges as a layered series of tilted and breaking walls, between which program elements are contained within spaces visible only from a perpendicular viewpoint.

On passing, brilliant red fire vehicles are glimpsed, their lines of movement inscribed in surrounding asphalt – a visual grammar also used to inscribe the ritualized exercises completed by fire teams.

This building is ‘movement frozen’ – a vivid, lucid expression of the tensions necessary to remain ‘alert’, to explode into action as required.

The building functioned as a firehouse until the fire district lines were re-drawn and the Vitra complex was finally covered by a nearby fire department. In 2004 she received the Pritzker Prize. Walls appear to slide one across the other, main sliding doors form a ‘moving’ wall.

The whole building is constructed from exposed, reinforced in-situ concrete, marked by the sharpness of all edges and the absence of all edgings and claddings to retain the clarity and simplicity of this prismatic volume.

This same absence of detail informed the frameless glazing, the sliding planes enclosing the garage, and the treatment of the interior spaces, in which lines of light are direct, logical and precise.

ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS

Zaha Hadid

Patrik Schumacher

Simon Koumjian, Edgar Gonzalez, Kar Wha Ho, Voon Yee-Wong, Craig Kiner, Cristina Verissimo, Maria Rossi, Daniel R.

Oakley, Nicola Cousins, David Gomersall, Olaf Weishaupt

GPF & Assoziierte

Today’s avant-garde – Venturi, Koolhaas, Eisenman, Hadid - have all won their spurs by designing fire stations.

This one-off architecture will not make the world a better place and will only retain its powerful impact if it is not eroded by fickle “style reproductions”.

Hadid's interplay of angles and use of color makes the building's interior as visually interesting as the outside without making it unnecessarily busy. Aside from the obvious appeal of the building's outside, it should be noted that the back of the building also features poured concrete benches which mirror the buildings more sculptural qualities.