Guangzhou Opera House

Zaha Hadid's opera house, shaped like two smooth pebbles on the bank of the Pearl River.

Its flowing, rock-like shape looks very different from a traditional theatre. It has become the biggest performing arts centre in southern China and is counted among the three biggest theatres in the country, together with the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing and the Shanghai Grand Theatre.

A contest and a long build

In April 2002 an international competition drew detailed designs from Coop Himmelb(l)au, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid. In November 2002 Hadid's double pebble was named the winner, and the groundbreaking was held in early 2005. The project cost 1.38 billion yuan, about 200 million US dollars. The freestanding concrete auditorium sits inside an exposed steel frame clad in granite and glass, and it took more than five years to build.

Opening night

The first production was Puccini's opera Turandot, directed by the American filmmaker Shahar Stroh in May 2010. The opera had been controversial in China in earlier years. The Guardian's architecture critic Jonathan Glancey praised the new building, calling it at once highly theatrical and insistently subtle.

The architect

Zaha Hadid was an Iraqi-British architect, born in Baghdad in 1950, and the Guardian described her as the Queen of Curves. In 2004 she became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Besides the Guangzhou Opera House, her major works include the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics and the MAXXI Museum in Rome. She died in 2016.

On the globe

The toy model shows the two smooth, pebble-like halves of the opera house beside the river.