MNN - Mother Nature Network

From the unlikely (but not all that really) design collaboration file:

 

Musician, producer, coffee table book scribe, and prolific design dilettante Pharrell Williams has hinted at a potential collaboration with Bagdad-born starchitect Zaha Hadid in which the duo would tackle prefab housing.

 

Hadid, the firm female and the first Muslim to win the prestigious Pritzker Prize, is just one of the bold-face names (Ana Wintour, Jay-Z, Buzz Aldrin, and Takashi Murakami to name a few) that served as a contributor to Williams’ 2012 book “Pharell: Places and Spaces I’ve Been.” (Rizzoli). The whole prefab conversation originates from a chat shared by the two within the book. In their dialogue, Williams gushes to Hadid that she’s his “favorite architect” and that he’d be interested in working with her on making “something that was about $75,000 to $100,000 that we would could do something really fun and really next-level that could change the game.”  He asks that if that she’d be “into it,” he’d love to talk further about “doing prefab houses together.” Hadid's reply? "That would be very exciting.”

Last week, Hypebeast — an online publication that excerpted the conversation between Williams and Hadid to help push his book upon its release — followed up with the lauded singer-rapper-composter and picked his brain on various topics (fashion, furniture design, world travel, working with Miley Cyrus). They also ask what design-related projects that are in the works.

 

“There’s a collaboration I’m working with Zaha Hadid, we’re touring around with the idea of a prefab for a house,” Pharrell responds. When asked exactly what stage that idea is at, he responds: “Well, we’re going to see something through.”