Dreams made concrete

Three months after Zaha Hadid’s death, the designs she left behind continue to shock and awe, finds Jonathan Glancey

When Zaha Hadid died in March, she left behind the fastest growing architectural practice in Britain. “It is impossible to say how much we have all been affected by Zaha’s death,” says Patrik Schumacher, senior partner of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) as well as her long-time friend and collaborator. “Zaha was… Zaha. Irrepressible, a force of nature. But her work – our work – carries on.”

Indeed it does. Until late November, the Palazzo Franchetti in Venice, a compelling attraction in its own right, is also home to an exhibition devoted to ZHA. There are imaginative models for buildings, furniture and products – many still prototypes – in plastic, resin, polymers, folded paper and even pure gold. More than a few resemble jewellery.

Wall-to-ceiling colour photographs show the firm’s largest building projects, among them Beijing International Airport’s vast new Terminal 1, due for completion in 2018. Also on display are paintings dating from the early Eighties, offset by pure white scale-models of skyscrapers. One, fluid in form, represents the Central Bank of Iraq, planned for Baghdad, where Hadid was born in 1950. It is architecture as homecoming, and in such style.

This is not an art exhibition, but a mesmerising inventory of architectural forms that have been morphed over the past 30 years into radical, yet perfectly real, buildings in, to date, 44 countries. These exhibits are also tools forged through an unrelenting process of research, development and experimentation that has characterised ZHA since it was established in London in 1979.

Days after seeing the exhibition, I meet Schumacher in the café of the Architectural Association School in Bedford Square, London. This is where, in the early Eighties, I first encountered Hadid’s dramatic paintings, and the architect herself. It was obvious then that while the AA – under the radical chairmanship of Alvin Boyarsky – did much to nurture Hadid’s embryonic talent, her style was barely restrained by the polite Georgian setting of Bedford Square.

“When I joined Zaha in 1988,” says Schumacher, “there were just a few of us. We completed our first building in 1993” – a fire station for Vitra, the German furniture maker, at Weil am Rhein – “and since grew to 400 architects. Now we have offices in London, New York, Mexico City, Dubai, Beijing and Hong Kong.”

Until Hadid’s sudden death, at the age of 65, ZHA had completed 55 projects worldwide. They now have a further 45 buildings on the go. Despite the radical nature of its work, Schumacher sees no reason why the firm’s pace should slow down. “We continue to move forward,” he says. “In the Nineties, we shaped collisions of fragmented architectural forms into buildings. Today, our work offers a fluid complexity and whatever we come up with as a final form for a building, we can build. The form of our work will continue to change as Zaha has always wanted. There is no house style we have to follow.”

It seems absurd today to think that ZHA’s competition-winning design of the midNineties, for what was to be the Cardiff Bay Opera House, was undermined by wilfully philistine placemen and politicians who described it as unbuildable. Compared to the galaxy of daring designs

‘Everything you see here is on the limit, both architecturally and technically’

Radical: Salerno’s maritime terminal, above and top, is the first design by Zaha Hadid, left, to be completed since her death in March