Architect Zaha Hadid broke barriers for women, but that wasn’t her design
The death of Zaha Hadid at 65 on Thursday has reverberated through quarters of the architecture world from Baghdad, where she was born, to New York, London and Guangzhou, China, where she built. But the sense of loss, mounting online, has been most pronounced among female architects, who saw Hadid as a rare beacon of hope for their own success in a male-dominated field and a barometer of its continuing sexism.
“As a female architect, I am in shock and distressed that another brilliant creative mind has passed away, especially a woman on par with the best male architects in the world,” Gisela Schmidt, an architect in Atlanta, wrote on Facebook. “She was a strong woman in a profession that” silences them, she added. “What a loss for us!”
Abdullah Mahmoud, a young architect in Damascus, Syria, who posted a tribute to Hadid on Facebook, said that in his classes at Damascus University, from which he graduated last year, about 70% of the students were women — an indicator of how the profession’s balance is shifting — and that Hadid’s influence was hard to overstate.
“For young architects here, especially the female ones, she was like a great princess,” Mr Mahmoud said. “For us, it was like: if Zaha Hadid could go to London and be a great architect and build for the Olympics and in China and everywhere, then why can’t we do that? And that was very strong for the women I studied with.”
Hadid was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s top honour, in 2004, a quarter-century after the prize’s founding. Since that milestone, the percentage of female architects in the United States has barely grown, increasing to 25.7% from 24%, according the Bureau of Labour Statistics.
Architect Richard Meier recalled how several architects used to gather casually for dinner at the Century Club in New York, including Philip Johnson, Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman. “Zaha was the first woman, as far as I can remember, to attend one,” Mr Meier said. “She had a sense of herself that she could fit in wherever she wanted. She knew that what she did was highly respected.”
Initially, Hadid seemed to resist the idea of serving as a role model because of her gender. “She’s a woman architect who never wanted to be called a woman architect — she was just an architect and one of the best ones,” said Amale Andraos, the dean of Columbia University’s architecture school. “But clearly she broke new ground by being a woman, by not being Western, by being educated all over the world — there is so much she enabled.”
Over time, Hadid came to recognise her importance as a symbol. In the book Where Are the Women Architects?, to be published this month by Princeton University Press, Despina Stratigakos, the interim chairwoman of the University at Buffalo’s architecture department, recounts Hadid’s comments after winning the Architects’ Journal’s inaugural Jane Drew Prize for “her outstanding contribution to the status of women in architecture” in 2012.
“I used to not like being called a woman architect: I’m an architect, not just a woman architect,” Hadid said after winning the award, in an interview with CNN. “Guys used to tap me on the head and say, ‘You are OK for a girl.’ But I see the incredible amount of need from other women for reassurance that it could be done, so I don’t mind that at all.”
Despite her efforts over the years to be judged on the merits of her work, the news media often included discussion of her physical appearance or manner, rather than her professional performance.
“Can you imagine the leading practitioners in other professions treated to such personal scrutiny on receiving a major award?” asked Robert Ivy, in Architectural Record, after Hadid won the Pritzker. “Marie Curie, for instance, subjected to fashion commentary? Or Nobel laureate Toni Morrison appraised for her hairstyle? In receiving the Pritzker, Hadid joins those noble ranks and deserves better. Architecture deserves better.”
Nevertheless, over the years, Hadid continued to be criticised for headstrong behaviour that her friends say would have gone unnoticed in a man.
“Everybody knows her as a diva and as a tough woman,” architect Thom Mayne said.
“She’s tough because she’s in a profession that takes toughness to get through it. She has this great sense of humour and is actually a very motherly, caring person. Funny, incredibly loyal. She was a sweetheart. And it’s not the part that most of the world sees.”
Tegan Bukowski, a former student of Hadid’s at the Yale School of Architecture, who now works in the London office of Hadid’s practice, said the office was rare in the profession, not only because it was nearly equally split between men and women.
“Zaha herself was a role model, but she also created role models in the company by making sure that women thrived,” Ms Bukowski said. “She never held down men at all, but it was just about your work and your talent. It never felt like gender was an issue. Because she basically just levelled the playing field in a way that I’ve never seen in any other practice before. And it makes me so sad to think about her being gone because I think, who can I look up to like that now?”