Zaha Hadid is predictable in only one thing: at some point, usually sooner rather than later, she will say or do something jaw-dropping. In Copenhagen last week she was launching her latest building, an art-museum extension. She didn’t speak for long, but long enough to declare that just about nobody in her large office could draw except her. That’s them told. The top cat is the one with the pencil, not the computer.
Later, she held court in a restaurant up the coast, designed in the 1930s by Denmark’s modernist pioneer and architect-designer hero, Arne Jacobsen. This is a white modern shrine, a holy of holies. After various people had stood up to toast her, Hadid, too, got to her feet. She was nice to all the right people. Then she looked around her and lost it. “Whose idea was it that the best fun you can have in Copenhagen is to have dinner in a sanatorium?” she drawled, adding: “I’m off to the toilet.”
Hadid, you will have gathered, is not a tactful type. She speaks as she finds, in a rich bourbon-and-Marlboro accent (though she does not drink, and says she has not smoked for four years). Some find this frankness alarming, some enchanting. But if you are one of the world’s dozen top architects, and the only woman to enjoy that role — let alone a woman who is Iraqi-born — well, you can say what you like.
This is not unusual in the rarefied world she inhabits. Most of the best, most in- demand international architects behave in an equally high-handed fashion: she’s just matching the boys in America’s exclusive Pritzker-prize club, shot for shot. What makes her cherishable is that, unlike most of them, she always lets the mask slip in public. An off-script thought strikes her, and out it comes. Then she shrugs and smiles in her toothy way, as if to say — oh well, ain’t nothing but the truth. Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano and her old boss and chum, Rem Koolhaas, do not act quite like this when they are let out. Which makes Hadid, I reckon, a national treasure to set alongside Tracey Emin. Gawd bless yer, ma’am.
She’s a lot more relaxed now than she used to be, doubtless because she’s building stuff everywhere. She’s happy to gossip about her chances in the forthcoming Stirling prize, against the likes of Foster and the office of the late Enric Miralles, he of the Scottish Parliament building. Her assured BMW factory in Leipzig — which, in an act of theatrical bravura, brings suspended car shells clanking through the office atrium — is fancied by many. She claims she has no expectations, but, staying with the conversation, says she has a sneaking admiration for Miralles.
The £4.5m Ordrupgaard Museum extension is something of a footnote in Hadid’s onward march. Won in competition at a time when she didn’t have so much work on, it is a small, fluid exercise in black concrete and glass that doubles the display space of this bijou rural gallery of French impressionists on Copenhagen’s northern fringes.
Architects cannot help influencing each other: the trick is to stay ahead of the game. So, Hadid’s jagged, splintery early style, now adopted in diluted form by many others, is conspicuously absent here. The curves and loops of the continuous concrete slab forming the floor, walls and roof are a much softer proposition. Moulded concrete, however, is not a technology the Danes are familiar with, and some of this building — in particular, the way the rectilinear steel-framed glazing system is cut to join the double- curving roof slab — looks a little botched. The join is anything but neat. Mention this to Hadid and she agrees. Yes, she says. It was a bother getting it built. They did it much better at Leipzig.
This insouciance shows through in other ways. Most architects of art galleries go to absurd, complex lengths to get filtered daylight coming down from above. Hadid just slashes simple gashes in the concrete roof and puts in something opaquely translucent. And where there are particularly sensitive drawings and watercolours to protect, she leaves out the daylight altogether. It works. What’s the problem? In the downstairs gallery, where there’s a good Gauguin show, two of her walls lean backwards, so putting the pictures on a slight slant. The curators love what they call this “easel angle”. Hadid shrugs again. Easels? What easels? She just did sloping walls, that’s all.
It was a treat to behold, Hadid among the Danes. The Nordic regions embracing Babylon. An unlikely meeting, but they got there before the British. Famously, the English Establishment, in the form of the millennium commission, did everything in its power to stop her Cardiff Bay Opera House being built, and — aided by a local hate campaign — succeeded. Being given the Mind Zone in the Millennium Dome was scant compensation. In 2003, she won an opera house in Guangzhou, China, which must help.
Now several British buildings are pending: a Maggie’s cancer-care centre in Fife; a transport museum in Glasgow; the HQ of the Architecture Foundation in London; and, most prominently, the first of the 2012 Olympic buildings to be allocated, the London Aquatics Centre, with its beautiful undulating roof. Very different from her next, imminent completion: the Phaeno Science Centre, in Wolfsburg, Germany, which is like a prehistoric amphibian lurching across the landscape. In a slightly scary way.
Where is Hadid’s architecture heading? She admits to no influences beyond Soviet constructivists such as Melnikov. At the moment, though, it looks a bit Scandinavian, oddly. Somewhere on the fault line between two great Finnish architects: Alvar Aalto, with his wavy ceilings, and Eero Saarinen, a master of organically shaped moulded concrete buildings in 1950s America. Oh, and there’s a bit of Frank Lloyd Wright starting to creep in now. Who’d have thought it?
But that’s Hadid: off the wall.
www.zaha-hadid.com
The world’s her concrete cupcake
www.ordrupgaard.dk
A jewel casket of French impressionists
