Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid: The Architect Who Drew First

In 1983 an unknown thirty-three-year-old won an international competition for a leisure club on a mountainside above Hong Kong with a proposal that looked less like a building than a geological event. The Peak was never built. Neither, eleven years later, was the Cardiff Bay Opera House, which she also won and which local opposition killed. For most of two decades Zaha Hadid was the most talked-about architect in the world on the strength of things that did not exist.

Baghdad, Beirut, Bedford Square

She was born in Baghdad in 1950, the daughter of Mohammed Hadid, a leading liberal Iraqi politician and industrialist, and Wajiha al-Sabunji. She went to a Catholic convent school in the city, then to boarding schools in Switzerland and England from 1965, and took a degree in mathematics at the American University of Beirut between 1968 and 1971.

The mathematics matters. She arrived at architecture already fluent in the idea that space could be described by equations rather than by rooms. In 1972 she entered the Architectural Association in London, then the most argumentative school in the world, where she studied under Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis and won the Diploma Prize in 1977. Her graduation project, *Malevich's Tectonik*, put a hotel on the Hungerford Bridge across the Thames using the vocabulary of Russian suprematist painting. She went to work with her teachers at OMA, and by 1979 had her own practice, run out of a small mews house.

Paper Architect

In 1985 she rented a single classroom — Studio 9 — in a Victorian schoolhouse in Clerkenwell. Her office would eventually swallow the entire building.

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s she worked largely on paper, and the paper was the point. She painted. Her drawings borrowed Malevich's suprematism and its warped perspectives to depict buildings from multiple vantages at once, exploding plans across the canvas. Critics called her a paper architect, and the label was accurate and unfair in equal measure: what she was drawing could not yet be engineered, priced or built. She was designing at the edge of what computation would permit, roughly fifteen years before computation permitted it.

The first crack came in 1993 with the Vitra Fire Station at Weil am Rhein in Germany — small, sharp, all tilted planes and frozen motion, and unmistakably the drawings made solid.

The Buildings Arrive

Then everything arrived at once. The LFone pavilion at Weil am Rhein and the Mind Zone at the Millennium Dome in 1999; the Hoenheim-Nord car park and terminus in Strasbourg in 2001; the Bergisel Ski Jump at Innsbruck in 2002; the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati in 2003; the Phaeno Science Center at Wolfsburg in 2005.

In 2004 the Pritzker Architecture Prize went to her — the first woman to receive it. The jury was candid that it was rewarding a trajectory rather than a catalogue. Lord Rothschild, its chairman, praised her as "unswerving in her commitment to modernism" and noted that she had "moved away from existing typology." Frank Gehry observed that she had "one of the clearest architectural trajectories we've seen in many years." Ada Louise Huxtable called her "one of the most gifted practitioners of the art of architecture today," with "a consistently original and strong personal vision that has changed the way we see and experience space." Karen Stein said she had "built a career on defying convention — conventional ideas of architectural space, of practice, of representation and of construction."

The major works followed: the MAXXI museum in Rome, begun in 1998 and finished in 2009; the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics; the Guangzhou Opera House in 2010; the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, completed in 2012; the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul in 2014. She won the RIBA Stirling Prize twice in succession — for MAXXI in 2010 and for the Evelyn Grace Academy, a London school, in 2011. She was appointed CBE in 2002 and Dame Commander in 2012, made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France and awarded Japan's Praemium Imperiale, and received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for 2016 — the first woman to be given it in her own right.

Why Zaha Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty was spatial invention arrived at through painting. Hadid did not draw buildings and then render them; she painted spatial ideas in a suprematist idiom — multiple simultaneous viewpoints, fields rather than rooms, geometry in motion — and then spent years forcing engineering to catch up with the images. Very few architects invent a formal language; she invented one and lived long enough to see it built. The word has been used about her directly and by serious people: Bill Lacy of the Pritzker said that "only rarely does an architect emerge with a philosophy and approach to the art form that influences the direction of the entire field," and Hugh Pearman, editor of the RIBA Journal, called her flatly "the most brilliant architect of her generation," while remembering her as "caustic, funny, awkward even — yet she had amazing presence." RIBA's citation for the Royal Gold Medal spoke of a "towering, distinctive and relentless influence."

The counter-case is real. She received architecture's highest honour in 2004 on a conspicuously thin record of completed buildings — the Pritzker itself acknowledged the small body of built work — and an art form judged on what stands is entitled to ask whether a decade of unbuilt competition wins is achievement or promise. Her forms became possible only through computation and required very large budgets and patient, wealthy clients, which raises the awkward question of how much of the signature is vision and how much is money. And by her death her practice employed more than four hundred people and had produced some 950 projects across more than forty-four countries; at that scale "a Zaha Hadid building" describes a studio's output as much as one woman's hand. What is not in doubt is the originality of the language itself, which she had working on paper long before anyone could pour it.

Legacy

She taught at the Architectural Association until 1987 and held professorships at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, so the argument propagated through students as well as buildings.

She died in 2016, aged sixty-five, with the practice at full stride and a queue of unfinished work behind her. Her real achievement is legible in what she made possible for others: the curved, computed, non-orthogonal building is now a normal thing to attempt, and it was not when she started drawing.

Achievements

• First woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize (2004)
• RIBA Stirling Prize, 2010 (MAXXI) and 2011 (Evelyn Grace Academy)
• First woman to receive the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in her own right (2016)
• Designed the Heydar Aliyev Center, London Aquatics Centre, and Guangzhou Opera House