If everything had panned out differently, she might have become a politician. Or perhaps a singer. Psychiatry would also have interested her. Yet Zaha Hadid opted for architecture and that was a good choice: She has achieved renown, success, indeed world fame. Zaha Hadid is a star.
When revealing her recipe for success, she deliberately proclaims herself down-to-earth: industry, care, hard work and unyielding determination have been crucial for her success. Add talent, inspiration, boldness and ultimate rejection of compromises, and you have a rounded personality, a woman who for more than three decades has been stirring up the architecture scene, striking terror into the hearts of her clients and astonishing people all over the world.
Radical designs for courageous clients
Admirers call her ideas bold, the doubters, reckless. Her buildings are at once visionary and provocative, the designs radical. The shapes that she creates are sometimes angular and interlocking, as at the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, sometimes organic, sweeping and for all their size, filigree, as at the planned Performing Arts Center in Dubai. Hadid constructs buildings that seem to sway, creating open spaces that open up many paths within and stimulating movement. One does not find just one perspective within, but several; and not one geometric shape, but fragments of many. That acts as both a challenge and a stimulus. Her designs set high standards – for the users, and most certainly for her clients: Zaha Hadid does not use a computer in her work, but sketches by hand, completely freely. The results seem like a three-dimensional collection of building elements, like abstract paintings. That calls for clients with imagination, trust and above all, courage.
Guangzhou Opera House (Guangzhou, China), BMW Central Building (Leipzig, Germany), Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Arts (Cincinnati, USA) © Roland HalbeSince winning the Pritzker Prize in 2004 – the most highly regarded of all architecture prizes – Hadid has been almost overwhelmed by commissions. That represents handsome recognition for a woman whose career was initially founded in disappointments. When she started work, namely, Hadid’s success remained very much theoretical. She may have become renowned for her designs, yet the projects were only seldom implemented. In 1982, she prevailed against 600 rivals in the competition for The Peak, a luxurious leisure club in Hong Kong. Yet The Peak was never built, with Hong Kong being handed back to China. In 1986, she won the contest to build an office on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin – yet the contract went to a competitor. In 1989, she came first in a competition for revamping an Arts & Media Center in Düsseldorf – but another scheme was realized. In 1994, she created the winning design for the Cardiff Opera House in the UK – yet what was built was the Millennium Center, a faceless, uninspired, multi-functional, utilitarian complex. Since you cannot earn money simply with brilliant ideas and visionary designs, Hadid teaches architecture and can thus keep her office going even when times are difficult.
Architecture for a better world
Yet now everything has changed. The ‘New York Times' termed her Rosenthal Center in Cincinnati the most important new building in America since the Cold War. A ferry terminal to her plans is under construction at Salerno in Italy, so is a high-speed train station in Naples. She is designing opera houses for Dubai and Guangzhou, private residences in Moscow and the USA, a cancer clinic in Kirckaldy, Scotland, a transport museum for Glasgow and the Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics in London. So much for Zaha Hadid as an architect, she is cosmopolitan, a world star.
The Aqua Table, Moon System (London, UK), Z-Car (London, UK)Now for Zaha Hadid as master planner, a woman about to give the decaying Zorrozaure quarter of Bilbao a new face and hence fresh life. She will be making the peninsular an island, connected to the city centre by eight bridges. An area of 72 hectares will be given 6000 new houses, two technology centers and a four-hectare park. Estimated costs to date: 1.43 billion euros. Bilbao’s city leaders wished for more than a piece of architecture to stir attention, they wanted a statement. So Hadid designed a city for living in – a dream city. She received the contract for the project in 2003; building should start in 2010 and be completed in about 2030. It is the work of a lifetime. “If only we architects were intentionally allowed to do what we dream of,” she says, “then the world would be a better place.” One more bold vision, and Zaha Hadid could make it a reality.
ZAHA HADID by Luke HayesZaha Hadid was born in Baghdad in 1950, her father a wealthy politician and industrialist in an Iraq that in those days looked to the West. Zaha initially studied mathematics in Beirut, then from 1972-77 architecture at the prestigious AA School of Architecture in London. Alongside others, one of her teachers there was neo-classicist Leon Krier, of whom she says, I learned a lot from him – namely, about how not to do it. Her models are Erich Mendelsohn, Mies van der Rohe, le Corbusier. After her studies, she worked for OMA, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in London, going freelance in 1980.
She achieved her international breakthrough in 1982, in the competition for The Peak in Hong Kong. Zaha Hadid has not worked solely as an architect, but also as designer for e.g., Swarovski, Dupont, Alessi and Established & Sons. In 2006, she was honored with a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, while the Design Museum London has a comprehensive show until November 25 2007.