Celebrating the life and work of Zaha Hadid
Who anyone who doesn’t know who Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid DBE RA was here is a little bit of a background about her. She was an Iraqi-born British architect and the first woman to ever receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 2004. She also received the Stirling Prize two years in a row for 2010 and 2011 which is the UK’s most prestigious architectural award.
Born: 31 October 1950, Baghdad, Iraq
Died: 31 March 2016, Miami, Florida, United States
Books: Architecture of Zaha Hadid in photographs
Awards: Pritzker Architecture Prize, Stirling Prize, Structural Steel Design Awards, Glamour Award for The Architect-In-Chief
Education: Architectural Association School of Architecture (1972–1977), American University of Beirut
Unfortunately Zaha Hadid died unexpectedly of a heart attack last year which sadly left many of her projects unfinished. Now in May 2017 which is just over a year since her death Google have made an artistic tribute to Hadid’s life and work. It features a catroon figure of Zaha Hadid along sideone of her buildings the Heydar Aliyev Center.
As well as making some of the most aesthetically pleasing buildings in the world she actually helped create a watch along side singing legend Will.i.am. Will.i.am released his first edition of the smartwatch at Wired 2014 called the PULS. As like most things he has produced it did pretty well in the US market however not so great internationally and he did go on to produce a second watch the PULS2.
The image below shows the PULS smartwatch with a smooth sleek design, simplistic black with a colour screen with was slightly customisable. The Puls actually required users to own a SIM card purely for the watch so that it could have a mobile connection however according to Will.i.am it allowed you to completely replace your phone. He also said the device would offer additional functions that are not currently available to smartphone users however in a fast growing industry by the time it was released most other watch brands had equal or better technology.
The PULS features a curved OLED screen similar to the design that some tech blogs and enthusiasts had predicted for the first Apple Watch. It also boasted two built-in speakers as well as a microphone,and of course SIM card slot. The innovative watch could make and receive calls, play music from a music library and be used to check on your social media platforms. It is voice controlled however you can also use the on-screen keyboard that uses predictive typing to overcome the limitations of its small key size. The watches main frame id rather chunks and people were worried this would divide peoples decisions as to whether to buy one or not, it is made from plastic and is available in a number of colours.
The world famous architect Zaha Hadid was quoted saying
“We welcome these collaborations that add something to our work and we always want to engage with things we don’t know much about, We work on the idea of striation, and how it could also have deflections. From a very large object to a very small object, you can interpret this as a very nice piece to touch. But it also operates as a device.”
Zaha Hadid designed the special edition for the new smartwatch which you can see images for below:
