Zaha Hadid: ‘Starchitect’ behind some of the world’s most striking buildings
1950-2016
OUTSIDER: Zaha Hadid in front of Glasgow’s Riverside Museum, which she designed DAME Zaha Hadid, who has died at the age of 65, was a superstar of architecture, specialising in organic, flowing forms that were admired all over the world.
She won acclaim with a series of startlingly futuristic buildings, including the Guangzhou Opera House in China and Maxxi, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, in Rome. In 2004, she became the first woman to win the Pritzker, architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel prize.
In 2010, she was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people on the planet.
A major setback in Britain came when her design for a new opera house in Cardiff — a sweeping “crystal necklace” of glass, chosen through a competition in 1994 — was abandoned a year later after being pilloried in the tabloid press as a newfangled and elitist structure for toffs, leaving her with the reputation of being someone who was good at ideas but not to be trusted with concrete and steel.
Even after she became one of the most sought-after architects in the world, opinion remained sharply divided. Some, including a few fellow architects, regarded her work as arrogant and oppressive, marked by an obsession with bravura form over function.
For the Maxxi art gallery in Rome, for example, she decreed that no paintings should actually be hung on the walls, restricting them to adjustable partitions suspended from the ceiling.
There were similar criticisms of her extension to the Ordrupgaard museum in Denmark.
She upset preservationists with her bulbous Galaxy Soho building in Beijing, looming menacingly over neighbouring hutongs — the streets and alleys of Old Beijing — several of which were demolished to make way for the new development. She was criticised too for the cultural centre in Baku she designed for Ilham Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan, a project commissioned to glorify a regime notorious for its human rights abuses.
To many others, however, Hadid was a genius, a visionary whose “explosive” imagination pointed the way to a better future and (as demonstrated in a 2007 exhibition of her work at the Design Museum), ranged from architecture into painting, drawing furniture, fashion and even concept cars.
Although she had practised in Britain for some 20 years, it was only in 2006 that Hadid’s first completed British project — her Maggie’s Centre in Fife — opened its doors.
The building that really transformed her reputation, however, was the Aquatics Centre built for the 2012 London Olympics. Like all Hadid projects, it prompted controversy and it ended up costing more than three times its original estimate. Yet the result — a building that was both airy and dramatic, topped with a spectacular undulating roof that made spectators feel like they were beneath a gigantic wave, was regarded as a triumph.
When she won the Royal Institute of British Architects Stirling Prize for the first time in 2010, it was for Maxxi.
When she won it for the second time the following year, it was for a British project — the Evelyn Grace Academy, a stylised zig-zag of steel and glass in Brixton, south London.
When she was appointed Dame of the British Empire in 2012, it seemed that Hadid had finally “arrived”. Yet she continued to see herself as an outsider. As recently as February this year, when she featured as a castaway on the British radio programme Desert Island Discs, she claimed that she had lost work because “I’m a woman, which is a problem to many people; I’m a foreigner, another big problem; and my work is not normative”.
Intense and combative, with a liking for Issey Miyake black suits worn with killer heels and a tendency to use words like “historicism” and “adjacency”, there was something more than a little intimidating about Hadid. Stories abounded of her grandeur, including an occasion when she dispatched an assistant from the Venice Architecture Biennale to her London flat to collect the shoes she wanted to wear for a party.
When, in September last year, she became the first woman to win the Royal Gold Medal in her own right, the citation went so far as to describe her as a “scary” character.
However, friends who had known her over many years said that, while unafraid to show her emotions, the real Hadid was also funny, frank and unfailingly loyal. In any case, having to fight hard, Hadid insisted, had made her a better architect and allowed her to withstand the critics.
Zaha Hadid was born on October 31 1950 in Baghdad into an affluent Iraqi family and grew up in a country which, at the time, was being hailed as the Middle East’s great success story. Her father, an industrialist, became a leader of Iraq’s National Democratic Party, which worked for the formation of a progressive, democratic state. This project was killed off by the Ba’ath party, which took power in 1963. The Hadids stayed on for long enough, according to her brother, to become the only family in Baghdad that never put a portrait of Saddam Hussein on its walls.
Born a Sunni Muslim, Hadid was educated by Catholic nuns before taking a degree in mathematics at the American University of Beirut. In 1972 she moved to London to study at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, a private school that encouraged students to ignore pragmatic considerations of the job market.
It was only in 2003 that her first major civic building, the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, opened its doors. The project brought Hadid the Pritzker prize, and after that her work, which involved a team of 400 architects, encompassed schools and universities, museums and cultural centres, opera houses and parliamentary buildings. She did not produce a major building in Britain, however, until a transport museum in Glasgow was completed in 2011 (her other British commissions included the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in Kensington Gardens, opened in 2013).
Last year Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, announced the scrapping of her design for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic stadium amid a row about spiralling costs, after it had been likened — unflatteringly — to a giant bike helmet, a turtle and a toilet seat.
Hadid died of a heart attack in hospital in Miami, where she was being treated for bronchitis. — © The Daily Telegraph, London
Having to fight hard, Hadid insisted, had made her a better architect and allowed her to withstand the critics