Michigan State University has chosen the world's most famous female architect, Baghdad-born Zaha Hadid, to design its new $26-million Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in East Lansing. During an announcement at MSU's Management Education Center in Troy, university President Lou Anna K. Simon said MSU considered several world-class architects but that "Ms. Hadid's design truly captured the spirit of what this iconic building will represent to MSU's campus." The museum, slated to open in 2010, is to include about 26,000 square feet of gallery space and will be built on Grand River Avenue at the Collingwood entrance at the site of the former Paolucci Building. That building was demolished in December, according to a Michigan State news release. MSU unveiled Hadid's preliminary design, showing a sharply angular, low-slung horizontal building with a glass and aluminum skin and an outdoor sculpture garden.
Hadid, who attended the announcement, said she was delighted to get the commission.
"Art museums are centers for the exchange of ideas, showcasing the art that feeds the cultural life of the community," she said. "I believe we can create buildings that evoke original experiences, inspire people and make them excited about new ideas."
Hadid, who is based in London, England, received the 2004 Pritzker Architecture Prize, an international honor often called the Nobel of architecture. She was the first woman so honored. She is known for the dramatic, even theatrical, renderings of her proposed designs, and for a modern architecture marked by fragmented geometry.
Although she has been in high demand around the world in recent years, the Broad Art Museum would be just the second building she has completed in the United States, after the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati that opened a few years ago.
Today's announcement caps a process that began in June 2007 when the Broads gave a gift of $26 million to help pay for the new museum, to be built on MSU's campus in East Lansing. The museum will focus on modern and contemporary art.