Study for overall isometric night view, the Peak project, Hong Kong (1983 Competition)等軸測研究圖,夜景, 山頂項目,香港(1983年競賽)
1991
In 1983, Zaha Hadid won the competition for the Peak Leisure Club, a luxury recreational and residential complex that was to be built high in the hills overlooking Hong Kong. The proposal, which was her first project to gain widespread recognition, is highly illustrative of the formal experiments that would characterise her work throughout her career.
Hadid’s radical proposal involved levelling part of the site and using the extracted stone to clad a new ‘man-made polished granite mountain’, as she called it. Stacked, skewed, and sharply angled, the building’s four levels of residential and leisure spaces seem to erupt around a central void, which houses club facilities. This ‘Suprematist geology’, as Hadid described it, drew from the work of artists of the early-twentieth-century Russian avant-garde—especially Kazimir Malevich—who were a profound influence on her work.
The Peak Leisure Club was never built, but Hadid received international attention for the proposal. Its complex, shattered forms would become associated with the deconstructivist movement in architecture during the late 1980s. The project also predates the use of digital tools, and Hadid is often credited with developing a formal language for the architecture these tools would make possible.