If Zaha Hadid is worried about world economic collapse putting the kibosh on
her career, she’s not showing it. She slinks into her fiercely bleached,
immaculate penthouse living room all swagger and attitude. She is smaller
than you’d expect, given her fiery reputation and publicity pictures that
show a hair-do engineered into an Eighties power-bouffant, but still giving
it all that like some kind of Middle Eastern Liam Gallagher. She’s up for
it, all right. Up for a fight.
“People say it’s the end of the icon project,” she says. “Psssht.” Nothing
withers like a withering look from Hadid. Her eyes are ablaze. “I think it’s
too simplistic to say there’ll be no more exuberance in architecture. Just
look back. Norman Foster’s Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank — when was that
commissioned? During a recession. The Pompidou Centre? In a recession.
Lloyd’s? It’s too simplistic to say we’re all afraid, we can’t do icons, we
have to restrain. What does that mean exactly?”
In the week that the Prince of Wales opined to RIBA that “the giant experiment
with our built environment has gone too far and is no longer sustainable in
the circumstances in which we now find ourselves”, she has reason to be
offensively defensive. She is the queen of the extravagant “icon” project.
Her architecture, like her character, does not slip easily into the
background. Work such as the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, Germany, is
big, bold and unique and, when done well, unmissable.
I first experienced the Cincinnati Art Centre in 2003; it was like climbing on
to a rollercoaster. Where you might expect walls and a ceiling and right
angles you get instead galleries housed in horizontal oblong concrete tubes.
“It’s like Dr Caligari, right?” chuckled one visitor. It’s true, her
buildings, at their best, can mess with your head. And after decades of
struggling to find clients brave enough to take her on, she’s finally
building it like billyo.
This autumn, ten years in the making, her biggest building yet is finished —
the National Museum of XXI Century Arts, known as the Maxxi, in Rome. It
will be followed next spring by the Guangzhou Opera House, in China, a new
bridge in Abu Dhabi, a skyscraper in Marseilles and a university library in
Seville. Going up right now are a tower in Dubai, a station in Spain, office
buildings in France and Beirut, and, its wave-shaped roof rising as you
read, her controversial Aquatics Centre — the gateway to the London 2012
Olympics park. Yes, even her expat home, Britain, immune to her charms for
so long, has finally fallen for her. We can expect a pavilion for
performances of Bach at the Manchester International Festival in July, a new
academy school in London next year, and the Museum of Transport in Glasgow.
So much for the architect who, newspaper profiles always bleated, never got
work, never got appreciated, and designed only impossible architecture that
could never be built. Hadid is now leader of the world’s new architectural
Establishment. The old guard — Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster —
are in their seventies and eighties. Hadid and her generation, like Rem
Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel, are the ones that your average Chinese politician,
Russian oligarch or Middle Eastern prince will turn to for the latest art
gallery or skyscraper of challenging angles and avant-garde looks.
Her firm has swollen to 300, packed into her modest HQ, a Victorian board
school in Clerkenwell, like battery hens. She’s been there years, but it
still feels like a monochrome student digs, as if nobody’s had a millisecond
to unpack a poster or a pot plant. Her employees stare intently, baggy-eyed,
at computers, like it’s 2am and they’ve an essay to hand in.
Turnover doubled to £26.2 million in the 12 months before April last year. But
for how much longer? Architecture, always a volatile business, has been
exceedingly hard hit by the downturn, and Hadid with her “iconic” work has
more to lose than most. Cranes have stopped swinging all over the world,
even in that architectural Neverland, Dubai. Frank Gehry has laid off half
his office, Norman Foster a quarter. By comparison, Hadid has got off
lightly. Some jobs, such as the Dubai Opera House, are on ice, and she has
made a small number of staff redundant. But much of her work is tied to more
robust public finances, not the volatile private sector. And if the
proverbial did hit the fan? “I’d adapt. I have been there before,” she
smiles, “for decades.”
Indeed, she arrived from Iraq, 37 years ago, to study architecture in a
Britain tumbling into recession. “The three-day week and blackouts and
buying candles in the shops, having to rotate electricity with France
whenever we wanted to watch Top of the Pops or take a shower. I remember
drawing late into the night wearing blankets and gloves, with candles.”
In fact, for many younger, more radical architects, the lack of actual work
was freeing. Instead, more and more, like Hadid, were choosing to design
fantastical, conceptual buildings on paper. Three decades on, historians
look at the mid-Seventies as a time when the lack of work caused a
generation to rethink. And Hadid happened to be studying at the epicentre of
that shift, the private Architectural Association in Central London, then
the most fertile place for the architectural imagination in the world. It
was home to a precocious generation of students and teachers who, today,
have become household names, such as Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskind. They
were preoccupied with devising a replacement for the failed Utopian
Modernism of the Fifties and Sixties, one that wasn’t cheesily Postmodern
but more Modernist still — super-Modernism. The icon projects we see around
us today, from the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the Guggenheim in Bilbao to
the new CCTV state TV headquarters in Beijing, are the result. Hadid went
back for inspiration to Modernism’s roots in early 20th-century
Constructivism, and for the first few years of her career created, in
paintings and drawings, her now trademark architectural language of
fragmented geometry and swooshy, fluid spatiality; architecture which, in
the words of one of her heroes, the artist Kasimir Malevich, “would break
free from the earth”.
Hadid got the building bug early. She was born, she says, in a “normal” Iraq
startlingly different from the one on television today — a liberal, secular
country with a fast-growing economy that flourished through the toppling of
the monarchy in the 1958 Iraqi revolution, until the Baath party took power
in 1963. She grew up in Baghdad, where her father was leader of the Iraqi
Progressive Democratic Party and her bourgeois intellectual family played a
leading role. “Architecture was used as part of nation-building in Iraq
then,” she says. “I saw this great modern architecture every day,” all
thrusting concrete and massive ambition. “My school was opposite a Gio Ponti
building. And my aunt was building a house in the north, strikingly modern,
a beautiful ‘Corbu’ sort of house. I was very intrigued by it. I remember
going with my father, aged 9, to an exhibition where this house was shown. I
became obsessed by the topic.” It was also an Iraq in which for the first
time women were given the kind of education and ambition that her own mother
wasn’t allowed. It’s why, perhaps, she has remained so driven despite all
the obstacles.
The first few years of her career were stuttering. Clients and money came and
went. Her first big success, The Peak, a spa planned for Hong Kong, was
never built. Her first built project, the Vitra Fire Station at Weil am
Rhein in Germany, was a formal success but a functional failure. The fire
station moved out and the reputation, right or wrong, of a belligerent
architect more interested in shock than shelter was born. She then emerged
on to the world stage amid notoriety during the Cardiff Bay Opera House
debacle in the mid-Nineties — in which, despite winning the design
competition twice, politicians anxious about its radical shape denied her
the commission. She has rarely left the spotlight since. She has spoken out
about sexism in the construction industry, conservative taste in the UK
holding her back, and about the machinations of politicians.
Right now she’s fuming about a Radio 4 profile she heard at the weekend in
which Simon Jenkins described her architecture as being more appropriate for
the desert. “He was definitely responsible for the whole Cardiff fiasco,”
she says. “He was part of the Millennium Commission and people heard him say
in public, ‘Not on my dead body’. But what I find shocking is for him to say
it’s more appropriate for the Iraqi desert. First there’s hardly any desert
in Iraq. And anyway, what does that mean? Many years ago I was doing a
project in the City of London and I remember someone saying, ‘This may be
more appropriate for the Shah of Iran’. I said, ‘Touché. Wrong country.’
Then they said, ‘Well maybe it’s more appropriate for the desert’. Totally
obnoxious.” Racist? “I think it is.”
The latest controversy is a familiar one in architecture: cost. Her Olympics
Aquatic Centre was in the news last year for supposedly spiralling costs.
“It’s like now I’ve got work, people have to find another angle,” she
blusters. ‘I know what it is, she’s expensive.’ Wrong. The ODA [Olympic
Delivery Authority] should really make a press declaration about why it is.
We were told not to comment but now we have to defend ourselves because
there’s misconstrued information. The cost of a project comes in many parts.
The cost of the building. Contingencies. Inflation, over seven years. Then
you have fees, site, site works. So there was a gross figure of everything,
and a building construction figure, and they’re not the same.” The two, she
says, were conflated. “You know what’s really scandalous? All these bankers!
That’s wasted money, and nobody knows where it is.”
If Hadid has not had it easy, she doesn’t make it easier for herself. She
plays up to a grand genius stereotype she has not quite yet earned. At 59
she is in the midst of a belated learning curve about how to get her dreams
constructed. She admits that her character can sometimes be her own worst
enemy. “I do get frustrated. And I show it.”
Cardiff was a sobering experience, but from it she has learnt about the
politics of getting things built. She is a classic obsessive. “I am, I’m
obsessed by my work. It takes me about two weeks to relax,” she admits. “I’m
grateful but it’s a constant struggle. You have to work,” she sighs, “All!
The! Time! To achieve anything. All the time.” I believe her. She looks
exhausted. “With painting, with writing, you just need a pen, a brush, a
pencil. With architecture, you need an army.”
She lives the life you’d expect. Late nights, always on aircraft, single. “I
didn’t know it was going to be like this. Yes there have been sacrifices.
Had I just done the usual thing, come out of college and gone to work in a
big office, I’d have been more experienced, maybe I would have had a
partner. But I’ve worked all these years to get to a point where the work is
accepted. I’m busy. I can’t whinge about it!”
Coming to a city near you
J.S. Bach Chamber Music Pavilion Opening in July in Manchester Art
Gallery as part of the Manchester
International Festival. The temporary performance space is a giant peel
of metal curling around the performer and the audience.
Maxxi National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome Opening spring 2010.
Commissioned a decade ago but since plagued by typical Roman snail-pace
bureaucracy, this hugely ambitious gallery, made up of overlaid strips
intersecting like a plate of linguine, will be opened by Gianni Alemanno,
the Mayor, famed for his hatred of modern architecture.
Guangzhou Opera House Due for completion early 2010.
China sets great store by its new opera houses and this, with curves like a
giant outcrop of rock, looks set to be the most impressive so far.
Glasgow Museum of Transport Opening spring 2011. Hadid takes a cartoon
outline of a cityscape and extrudes it back like squeezing toothpaste out of
a tube.
The London Olympic Aquatics Centre Due for completion in 2011, this,
she promises, will be an “elegant pavilion in a park, dominated by its roof,
a wave with a dip in it; it’ll be a very exciting building to swim in”.
