Dame Zaha Hadid died a year ago, age 65, on March 31, 2016, in Miami. A symposium at Princeton University on March 30 and 31 marks the first anniversary of her death, bringing together those know knew her, including Patrik Schumacher, her longtime collaborator, and many of her students. “It was a traumatic event,” says Zaha Hadid Architects’ (ZHA) director Gianluca Racana, who has been with the firm 17 years and was instrumental in the design of the MAXXI Museum in Rome. “But in a weird way, it’s been a catalyst for the work of the office and the relationships between the people here. In some ways, it’s similar to what happened after the World Trade Center attack in New York; everyone says that, afterwards, those living in the city felt a greater sense of belonging, togetherness, and identity . . . We feel that, and the pressure to keep up the quality of the work of Zaha and this office moving forward.”
It is rare for a practice to outlive its eponymous founder—Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Oscar Niemeyer, and Eero Saarinen’s firms are all extinct. However, with Schumacher at the helm, ZHA hopes to prove the exception. “There was some kind of succession plan, in terms of my position,” Schumacher explains. “We had done so much together over the last decades. When I started [in 1988] there were four people here, and now we have 400–we achieved all that together.” Schumacher was the brains behind the practice’s investment in computational processes, which enabled Hadid’s deconstructionist schemes to finally be realized in three dimensions, and he worked on her first completed building, the Vitra Fire Station (1992). He coined the term “parametricism” to describe the resulting fluid, sculptural forms, a theory elaborated in a series of abstruse books and sometimes referred to as “Patrik-metricism” by his boss.
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