For Zaha Hadid, on her birthday.

Dame Zaha Hadid would have been 73 today. I have crystal clear memory of sitting in my favorite chair in the Sunny Isles Starbucks drinking a 2% milk latte on March 31, 2016 when we heard on the news that Zaha Hadid didn't make it through her fight with bronchitis at the Miami Beach Mt. Sinai.

It was truly painful to hear. That type of brilliance is not easy to come by in this world. And I admire her so much, the inventor of the 89 degrees, also called a planet in her own orbit. Zaha Hadid took the tenets of Russian suprematist art and melded these with architectural and infrastructure design. And the world of civil engineering was rendered speechless by the fluid, curvy beauty of her major architectural works.

One of the best known buildings by Zaha Hadid architects is the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Azerbaijan and it is indeed a beauty. My favorite work of hers however lies with infrastructure design, specifically the Napoli-Afragola high speed train station in Naples, Italy. The combination of artistry in commonplace infrastructure lost value with the industrial age in the late 1800s, and to see the re-introduction of such is more than a breath of fresh air. Zaha Hadid's rendition of Napoli-Afragola is less elaborate than many of her buildings, but the fluid are is very much present. The Sheik Zayed bridge in Abu Dhabi is next in line for fluid artistry melded with functionality. Very beautiful work by Dame Zaha Hadid. And on the architectural side we're super grateful to have the Scorpion tower just a stone's throw away in Miami.

Thank you, Dame Zaha Hadid for re-applying beauty in civil engineering. You have saved us aesthetically in an architectural world that demands 90 degrees.

#infrastructure #architecture #design #zahahadid #scorpio