Zaha Hadid Virtual Reality Experiences: The Peak 1982-83

"I used painting to develop my proposals for the Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong (1982-83), a building that was to be based on the landscape, and intended as a new man-made geology or ecology…The continuous line with many trajectories on the same surface evolved in my drawings and paintings at this time; I was using different perspectives to develop distortion." – Zaha Hadid

Suprematist Geology

The Peak was awarded first prize in a global competition to design a leisure club for a private client in the hills surrounding Hong Kong. Included in the seminal exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture at MoMA, New York, in 1988, The Peak marks a critical moment in Hadid’s career. The design and creation of a building – in this case a leisure club – as an architectural landmark in a major city such as Hong Kong is not necessarily a difficult formal exercise, but it does raise important conceptual and programmatic issues in the context of 20th-century architectural design. The site demands a certain inventiveness in its relationship to, and as a relief from the congestion of the city. Set high on a hill overlooking the city, the site is free from the condensed urban environment yet is still integrated with the land and water below. Constructive elements of various materials accentuate the dramatic visual conditions and natural arterial features of the site,creating a kind of Suprematist geology, both vertically and horizontally.

‘…the lesson to be learned through fragmentation is you cannot really occupy just any kind of moment. We decided we were going to look at these compositions as a way of organising space. I think this is the most important lesson I have learned: the idea of reorganising space in a different way.– Zaha Hadid

"The whole idea of lightness, floating, structure and how it lands gently on the ground. It all comes from [Suprematism]”– Zaha Hadid