Guangzhou Opera House

Hadid won the international competition for Guangzhou's new opera house in November 2002, beating entries from Rem Koolhaas and Coop Himmelb(l)au for a site on the Pearl River intended to anchor the city's new Zhujiang New Town cultural axis. Her scheme reads as two irregular boulders, one large and one small, set as if washed downriver and left on the bank — a freestanding, double-curved concrete auditorium shell sits inside an independent steel frame clad in triangulated granite and glass panels that tighten and dissolve into faceted glazing where the building meets the water. Ground was broken in 2005 and the building opened in May 2010 at a cost of roughly 1.38 billion yuan, its inaugural production a staging of Puccini's Turandot, a work banned in China for decades over its stereotyped depiction of a Chinese princess. Construction quality became a point of controversy in the Chinese press, with cracking granite panels and water damage reported within a few years of opening, problems the venue's operators have since worked to repair.