Le Corbusier designed a chaise longue, Mies van der Rohe had his Barcelona chair, and a bench by Frank Gehry was auctioned at an estimated $150,000 last year at Sotheby’s. Starchitects don’t just design buildings, and Zaha Hadid is no exception. An exhibition of her product designs, Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion, will open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) on September 17th.

Lacoste Shoes in leather and rubber, designed in 2008 by Zaha Hadid.

Hadid is no stranger to solo exhibitions—two very large ones were mounted at New York’s Guggenheim museum and London’s Design Museum in 2006 and 2007 respectively. And some of the objects on display at the PMA have been part of those exhibitions—Hadid’s Mesa Table, an organic branched table designed for Vitra in 2007 was displayed at the Design Museum show. But this will probably be the first exhibition to solely focus on her product design work, and as such is an unusual recognition for a major architect.

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The Guangzhou Opera House, by Zaha Hadid, photo: Virgile Simon Bertrand

Among the recognitions and awards given by the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Stirling and Lubetkin prizes are the most prestigious. The Lubetkin prize, in honor of the Tecton Group founder Berthold Lubetkin, is given to the best international building outside the European Union. The Stirling prize scarcely needs introduction. Long considered Britain’s foremost architectural award, and given for a building “built or designed in Britain,” it bestows upon the winner not only £20,000, but also a nimbus of accomplishment.

RIBA released the shortlists of both prizes this morning, and they include many familiar favorites of the Institute, such as Zaha Hadid, who has made it into both lists. Here are the selected buildings:

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Jacopo Foggini at the INTERNI exhibition. Photo: Paul Clemence.

The Milan Salone is going full blast and millions of micro to macro world views can be heard there. One moment you might see the exhibit of Italy’s largest design magazine, Interni, which challenged well-known “macro” architects to create “mutant and adaptable” larger than life building forms and the next, an up-coming artist’s micro-experiment to explore with video and dance such puzzling questions as why bees are disappearing from the planet.

Clearly the Salone del Mobile is much more than a furniture trade show. It is a vast dialogue on multiple, curious, holographic, networked, and hive mentality  — from the flood of global visitors to thousands of local teens crowding the streets, design revelers shuffling from one lively party to another. After sprints around three Milanese zonas and little sleep, here is a glimpse at the sites and happenings we took in. Read more…

The ongoing 2010 World Cup has been in the design news for all the wrong reasons. Everybody’s spent a lot of time griping about the design of the new ball, but more serious problems have emerged now. The whole event, it turns out, is an ecological disaster.

According to a recent study undertaken by the Norwegian government (bless those Scandinavians!) the World Cup will have a carbon footprint of 2,753,251 tons of CO2, equivalent to one year’s emissions from one million cars. There are a number of reasons why this year’s event is so unsustainable. For one, South Africa had to build a lot of the infrastructure from scratch. Five new stadiums were built, five old ones were upgraded, roads were improved and bigger bus systems were put in place. Secondly, a large portion of the World Cup’s audience is European. A non-European venue means a lot of fuel burnt on flights to and from Europe. All in all, the World cup might be the most unsustainable sporting event so far. But by all reports, the 2012 Olympics aren’t going to score any green goals, either. Read more…

Complete and completer: two new monographs on Zaha Hadid, from Taschen (left) and Rizzoli

The first thing to note about Philip Jodidio’s book Zaha Hadid: Complete Works, 1979-2009 is its size. In glossy, twelve-by-sixteen-inch leafs, Jodidio covers Hadid’s entire body of work, beginning with her early student projects, continuing through built and in-process buildings, and ending, after a frenetic 600 pages, with a section he calls “products, exhibitions, installations.” The effort is impressive, comprehensive, and a little bit overwhelming, filled with overblown statements about the architect’s merits (“Zaha Hadid has set architecture free, and it will never be the same again”) and loaded, somewhat more convincingly, with graphic evidence, including some models and plenty of drawings. Read more…

By now you’ve heard that Zaha’s alien mothership—a.k.a Chanel’s Mobile Art—has landed safely in Central Park’s Rumsey Playfield. The section of park known to NY music lovers as SummerStage is now host to this traveling art collaboration between Ms. Hadid and the fashion and cosmetic giant Chanel. The curvy temporary structure built by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect contains art work from twenty artists around the world who produced work inspired by Coco Chanel’s own creation—the quilted handbag, 2.55.

When the press release was sent out about Mobile Art’s imminent arrival back in July, the renderings had me thinking that Planned Parenthood would be ecstatic with its worldwide haute couture representation.

However, at Monday’s press preview the completed structure brought up a different image. Somewhere in the back of my kitsch-infested mind I felt this was not the first over-the-top architectural/cosmetic/fashion mashup on record. Koolhaas and Prada, yes. Gehry and Tiffany and Company, yes. But where else? And then it suddenly dawned on me—The Brady Bunch. Read more…

First there were her strappy plastic shoes for the Brazilian company Melissa, unveiled last month. Now Zaha Hadid has designed a door handle for the Italian manufacturer Valli & Valli. When Dezeen posted a sneak peek of the design after its Milan preview, a commenter noted the handle’s resemblance to the “wrath of Zeus.” (The press release calls the design “striking”—ha.) It does seem a bit aggressive. On the other hand, maybe it’s just what you need to put some zip in your step as you’re heading out the door. Read more…