Zaha Hadid, visionary architect, died last Thursday at the age of 65. She was a force, a formidable presence in a field that is, in a way, all about how one occupies space, what form a thing can take. To American eyes, her most iconic work might be one of her most recent: The London Aquatics Centre, with its roof that swelled like a wave, built for the 2012 Olympic Games. In 2004, she became the first woman to win the Pritzer Architecture Prize, the highest honor in her field.
For a deeper understanding of this pioneering woman and her work, ThinkProgress spoke with a few experts in architecture who reflected on her influence, her audacity, and her legacy. Here are their thoughts, condensed and edited for clarity.
‘I think she’s one of these rare people who had a vision of where the future could go.’
Nicholas Boyarsky, director of Boyarsky Murphy Architects, former student of Hadid’s and son of former Architectural Association director Alvin Boyarsky
I met her in 1980 or ’82. She was young, and she was my teacher. Her teaching style was characteristic. She’s quite a formidable character. She was not [famous when we met]. She’s also one of my dearest friends. She didn’t suffer fools, I should say. And she said what she thought. I think it’s very important to stress that she didn’t want to be seen as a female architect, she wanted to be seen as an architect. People are saying, the greatest woman architect has died, and to her, she was just an architect.
My father championed her when she was young, so I knew her from that perspective first. I think she was an amazing designer. She drew incredibly. She was incredibly skilled graphically, she was very original. And she was completely fearless. She would take her intuition and really push it, and in that way, was really able to push the development of our architecture much further. But I think underlying it is her incredible skills as an architect: her drawing skills, her sensitivities to materials and what you could do with them, her ideas about space.
It took her many years to be recognized, because a lot of what she was doing maybe wasn’t pragmatically buildable. It was really pushing structural engineering and other technologies quite far. I think she’s one of these rare people who had a vision of where the future could go, and being ahead of her time, there’s a certain amount catch-up on the part of everyone else.
She was controversial, I guess. Because she wasn’t just peddling the usual, commercial, normative architecture that we unfortunately see too much of. She was pushing the boundaries quite radically in what architects could be, what architecture could be in the future, how architecture could embrace new technology but be very innovative about form. So obviously your general public isn’t going to appreciate that, but over the years, her work was so strong that it will have left a huge impression.
She was an Arab Iraqi, brought up in Baghdad and then studied in Beirut, she obviously came from a very sophisticated family. She was influenced by Arab culture, the calligraphy, the script, and they became a kind of harness to a research into aspects of modernism that maybe people had turned their backs on.
I think she believed in herself. Just a real confidence, with moments of incredible doubt, I’m sure. But she was an outsider. Think about it: She was a woman, she was from Iraq — though in the ’70s and ’80s it wasn’t such a big deal as it is today — and I think she had a certain amount of outsider’s view on things, which enabled her to push her interests maybe even further. If you’re on the outside, you don’t have anything to lose, do you? She was determined and overcoming intense adversity, I suppose.
She shows that it’s just possible that in this world you can still have extraordinary, unique individuals who can still do extraordinary, unique things. Given the corporate world that we live in, that it’s still possible for people to break through all the ordinary crap and do something special.
‘Hardly anything is completely new, but she was about as close as you could get.’
G. Martin Moeller, Jr., senior curator at the National Building Museum
I’m in shock over the death. I think she’s just one of those people, you had a sense she was going to be around forever. She was a formidable force, and it’s hard to imagine that force being absent from architecture.
Zaha Hadid’s work was distinctive. And that seems like an easy thing to say, but in this day and age, there are thousands of buildings all over the world being built, and other architects are building on each other’s ideas — they develop ideas from other architects, and that’s fine — but she was incredibly original. I first became familiar with her work when I was a student, at a time when she hadn’t been able to get her work built. She was called a “paper architect,” which can be a fine thing; lots of ideas can be explored through theoretical design. But that’s one reason she was dismissed early on. She would do these spectacular drawings, things that looked like they defied construction. When she in fact did begin to build and created these equally stunning concoctions in three dimensions, I think people were very surprised that someone could actually bring those ideas to reality.
She eventually came into her own with a language that is heavily reliant on these incredibly fantastical curves, curvilinear. It’s a great word, curve and line. It’s not just free-flowing, swoopy curves. There’s a particular motif: It’s a line that goes into a curve that then goes into another line. It tends to shift perceptions of ground plane and of top, middle and bottom, basic aspects of the components of a building. But it allows them still to look like buildings. She created sculptural buildings that were still buildings, that met the needs of their occupants.
I don’t want to call her work a “signature style,” because that tends to diminish what we’re really talking about. This is not about decoration or a particular formal motif. This was an approach to design, this organic idea about what buildings could and should be. She continued to push the envelope about what forms were possible in buildings.
The fire station she did at the Vitra complex in Germany was small, and at that point in her career, it would have been easy to dismiss it as a one-off. But it was so extraordinary that I think a lot of people immediately paid attention. Like, this is real. She’s been inscribing these forms on paper but now, here it is, literally, in concrete. That was finished in 1993. I’d say it wasn’t until the early 2000s that people were saying: This is a formidable career. This is a serious practice. Major commissions will come here.
I know she had to put up with a lot as a female architect. I studied in England for a year, and I have to tell you, at least when I was in school there, my perspective was sexism was particularly more pronounced in the British architecture schools I attended than the American. This was the 1980s. She was just coming into her own. She was a major force in her school at that point. That atmosphere was much more difficult for women in the U.K. than it was in the U.S., and recognizing those difficulties were in the U.S. too.
I met her several times. She was not the warmest and fuzziest person. And people can say, a lot of male artists can be tough. But I think it’s a gender neutral statement: Some people are cheery and smile, and some people aren’t and don’t. She tended to be a very serious and intimidating person, and I think that was by virtue of her perfectionism, her belief in herself and her ideas, and I don’t think that would have been different if she were male. If she had been male, she still would have been a tough, chilly person. But she was impressive. She managed to create things I think a lot of other people would have shied away from, as they encountered the inevitable difficulties in the design process. I never sat in a client meeting of hers, but anyone, to get those things built, had to be a steel-willed person, and had to be able to defend his or her ideas, and do that time after time.
I suspect nowadays, there are probably people who are more comfortable with the idea of a woman designing a house, but when they see an airport or a giant medical facility, do they wonder if a woman can handle that? I’m sure there are people with those prejudices. She was perfectly willing to talk about being a woman in the profession. And it’s interesting, talking about the relatively small numbers of women in the profession, there’s not going to be a flood of other women getting those awards — like the Priztker Prize — for a while, because there haven’t been that many women at that level in the profession.
That sort of persona that was created — designed, if you will — that’s not unusual for prominent architects. She was not alone in that regard. There’s a consciousness of how one presents oneself. I think it’s a bit of the notion of the artiste, the expert, coming in. But I also think it cuts the other way — if you’re calling in someone to design a $100 million building for you, and they show up in a shlubby outfit, it sends a message. It’s important: We’re talking about aesthetics and presentation of ideas. But her specific choices of what she wore, they were very dramatic outfits. This was not off-the-rack stuff. She was deliberately creating an imposing image of herself. I think that she, even things like facial expressions and so on, I don’t remember ever seeing her smile. Some people can just command a room. It’s voice, attitude, the extent to which you let other people speak and you chime in.
She proved you could do things that were striking and still make them work. Hardly anything is completely new, but she was about as close as you could get.
‘She definitely had a persona that helped create a sense of power.’
Laura Briggs, head of the Department of Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design
If you get to look at her early drawings — she became famous because she was part of a group of architects in London at the Architectural Association at the beginning of her career — and at that time, she had created these incredibly beautiful drawings and paintings of architectural space. What was interesting is the power of those images; it created a ripple even before a building was built. Her drawings are interesting because they were, as much as anything, beautiful pieces of art, but they also were ways of exploring space. You can use it like a tool to understand new spacial concepts.
Those drawings were really quite radical for their time. Those were done in the 1980s and at the same time, in the world of architecture here in the United States, Michael Graves was building buildings that were referring to the history of architecture in their production. And she, on the other hand, was trying to work with the dynamic of space: How the building situated itself within the site as a kind of driver for the project. Also, I think her references were more, had more to do with constructivist architects, the language of modern architecture.
One of the things I think was really interesting about her work — I recently went to a lecture she gave at one of the ACSA conferences where she talked about this — is a way of looking at architecture not as a singular building but as situated within urban contexts, where one building or space is connected to each other. Even though he buildings look iconic, they were spatially very open to the urban fabric, and created these beautiful interior and exterior spaces. The form itself is really dramatic, so that gets overlooked. Some of her new buildings were larger scale so you could really get at that. It’s very much about, how do you approach it, how do you move through it, and how does it connect to the landscape?
The field is changing, but it is still challenging for women. The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture has statistics, and if you look at it today, the percentage of women studying architecture, it’s 40 percent women, but as you go up the ladder, the percentage of women who have their own firm is much, much less. Zaha was there ahead of many people. Really in the ’80s, there’s night and day difference in the way women are treated in architecture school than they are today. In the ’80s, it was still a carryover of old world, where men treated women as women and not as equals. And in the construction industry, if you look at those numbers, you’d find they are still very far behind in terms of representation of women. Architecture requires collaboration with individuals who build the buildings, which is a male-dominated world to this day.
She would give lectures non-stop. These hour-and-a-half lectures, a hundred slides. She was quite a character. She was very articulate about why she was doing what she was doing. She was serious, but definitely had a persona that helped create a sense of power, which I think helped her to attain the work that she was able to do.