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Zaha Hadid, the first female recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, was chosen by Karl Lagerfeld to create the Mobile Art CHANEL Contemporary Art Container, pictured below. Hadid, described by The Times last year as “the world’s most flamboyant architect” due to her “breathtakingly sensuous designs”, seems like an obvious choice for a man quoted as saying “I don’t like standard beauty – there is no beauty without strangeness.”

Hadid was awarded the Pritzker, considered to be the Nobel Prize of architecture, in 2004 and is arguably one of the most talented architects of her generation. According to the Museum Marketing Blog (where I found the pictures above and below), the Pavilion was inspired by Chanel’s signature quilted bag, but the official Chanel Mobile Art site says the exhibition inside the pavilion which will include work “inspired by the elements that give the emblematic quilted bag from CHANEL its identity”.

I can’t find a definitive answer as to if the Pavilion is also based on the icon bags – if you know please comment!

There is a great little vital tour of the exhibition space on the Chanel Mobile Art site where the concept is described:

“It is important to note that Mobile Art is less an itinerant exhibition than an artistic experience in a nomadic building. This is how both the architecture and the exhibition were conceived.”
…
“When you see pictures of the scale model, you notice that the architecture is completely organic. The walls are not straight.

Once inside the structure of Mobile Art, you find something undefined and fluid. It feels temporary, giving the impression of a virtual reality.
It plays on the idea of being in another dimension, in a cinematic universe.”

The tour starts in Hong Kong next month and comes to the UK in June 2009.

A long wait but hopefully one that’s worth it!