Lily Pads and Landing Pads

By Richard Lacayo

Right now there is precisely one first-rank woman architect--the estimable Zaha Hadid--who works on her own, not teamed with her husband or some other guy. But hold on, Zaha--reinforcements are coming. Lindy Roy, 40, is already the most famous woman architect who has just one completed project to her name: the new Manhattan showroom of the Swiss furniture company Vitra, which has become a showcase for Roy too. It's a suavely configured space where display platforms ribbon around corners or morph into mahogany staircases that have embedded steel treads.

But even before the doors opened there last fall, Roy, a South African based in New York City, was already much talked about for the supple and intricate design proposals she exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in Manhattan and in a one-woman show last year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. One of them is for a spa on the Okavango River Delta in Botswana. And we do mean "on"--the open-air guesthouses would float atop man-made "lily pads." Another plan is for her ingenious cross-shaped extreme-skiing facility in Alaska's Chugach Mountains, from which guests would be helicoptered to the highest slopes. "We had to come to grips with the logistics of a paramilitary operation," she explains. "Helicopters are large, dangerous objects, so we had to learn about the problems of flight path while not forgetting that we were designing a hotel, a place for leisure and pleasure." James Bond, we have your architect. --By Richard Lacayo