Zaha Hadid Biography
The designs of Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid (born 1950) are
daring and visionary experiments with space and with the relationships
of buildings to their urban surroundings.
Often named as the most prominent contemporary female architect, or
singled out for notice because of her Iraqi Arab background, Hadid is
significant beyond these accidents of birth for her intellectual
toughness, her refusal to compromise on her ideas even when very few of
them were being realized in concrete and steel. For many years, her
designs filled the pages of architecture periodicals but were dismissed as
impractical or as too radical, and Hadid even thought about giving up
architecture after she suffered a major rejection in her adopted homeland
of Britain in 1995. Her star began to rise internationally when her design
for Cincinnati, Ohio's new Center for Contemporary Art was selected
and built, earning worldwide acclaim. By the mid-2000s Hadid employed
nearly 150 people in her London office and was working hard to keep up
with new commissions that were coming in, offering her a chance to help
reshape the world architectural landscape.
Toured Sumerian Ruins
Born in Baghdad, Iraq, on October 31, 1950, Zaha M. Hadid grew up in a
well-educated Islamic family oriented toward Western multiculturalism. Her
father was an executive and, for a time, the leader of a liberal Iraqi
political party. The drawing ability that would later attract attention in
art museums was first absorbed from her mother. Hadid's interest in
architecture had roots in a trip her family took to the ancient
Sumer
region in southern Iraq, the site of one of the world's oldest
civilizations, when she was a teenager. "My father took us to see
the Sumerian cities," she told Jonathan Glancey of London's
Guardian
newspaper. "Then we went by boat, and then on a smaller one made
of reeds, to visit villages in the marshes. The beauty of the
landscape—where sand, water, reeds, birds, buildings, and people
all somehow flowed together—has never left me. I'm trying to
discover—invent, I suppose—an architecture, and forms of
urban planning, that do something of the same thing in a contemporary
way."
Hadid attended a Catholic school where French was spoken and nuns served
as instructors, but which was religiously diverse. As Hadid told
Newsweek
's Cathleen McGuigan, "the Muslim and Jewish girls could go
out to play when the other girls went to chapel." Hadid's
family expected her to pursue a professional career, and she studied math
at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon. Her family left Iraq after
the rise of dictator
Saddam Hussein and the outbreak of war with
neighboring Iran, but she has retained ties to both Iraq and Lebanon and
has at times had difficulty talking to interviewers about the ongoing
violence in her home region.
In 1972 Hadid moved to London (later becoming a British citizen) and
enrolled at the
Architectural Association School of Architecture. She has
never married nor had children. "If [architecture] doesn't
kill you, then you're no good," she explained to Glancey.
"I mean, really—you have to go at it full time. You
can't afford to dip in and out." By 1977 Hadid had received
her degree, along with a special Diploma Prize, and she began working for
a London firm, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, founded by one of
her key teachers, the similarly daring Dutch architect
Rem Koolhaas. One of her student projects was a design for a hotel built
atop the span of London's Hungerford Bridge.
Hadid opened an office of her own in 1980, but at first her ideas were
more in demand than her actual designs. Hadid taught courses at the
Architectural Association and filled notebooks with
one-of-a-kind ideas,
some of which were published in architecture magazines or exhibited in
galleries. Hadid began to enter design competitions, some of them
research-oriented and others for buildings intended for construction. Her
design for The Peak, a sports club jutting out horizontally from one of
the mountain slopes that surround the city of Hong Kong, won the top prize
in the institution's competition, but the building was never
constructed. Hadid's competition entries in the 1980s and early
1990s were little known to the public at large but stirred up interest
among her fellow architects, and even after she became famous, her website
continued to list her competition prizes before focusing on her actual
building projects.
Designed Fire Station
After several small projects, including one for the interior of the
Moonsoon Restaurant in Sapporo, Japan, Hadid's first major building
was constructed in 1993 and 1994: it was a small fire station, with
numerous irregular angles (Hadid has been widely quoted as saying that
since there are 360 degrees, she sees no reason to restrict herself to
just one), on the grounds of the
Vitra Furniture Company in Weil am Rhein,
Germany. In 1994 Hadid seemed to be on the verge of a breakthrough: her
design for the new
Cardiff Bay Opera House in Britain's Wales
region was selected for construction. It was to be an unorthodox building,
with sharp angles and interior spaces that ran into and through one
another rather than falling neatly into separate areas, but it was also
planned to be inviting to the user, with an auditorium surrounded by
glassed-in spaces that gave views of nearby Cardiff Bay.
With Hadid an unknown quantity and Britain's Prince Charles in the
midst of a widely publicized campaign in favor of neo-traditional
architecture in Britain, the design ran into trouble almost immediately.
The design competition was reopened, and Hadid's design was once
again named the winner, but the project's funder, Britain's
National Lottery, eventually withdrew its commitment. Hadid was
devastated. "It was such a depressing time," she recalled to
Rowan Moore of the London
Evening Standard
. "I didn't look very depressed maybe but it was really
dire. I made a conscious decision not to stop, but it could have gone the
other way."
At the same time, Hadid began to amass a solid core of admirers among her
staff, among architecture experts, and among ordinary observers. At the
same time the Cardiff project was going down in flames, Hadid designed a
temporary pavilion to house an exhibit for the architecture magazine
Blueprint
at a builders' convention. She had to present the structure,
described by Moore as "a thing of flying steel," to a
gathering of the magazine's advertisers, most of whom greeted it
initially with silence. But an executive from a firm that made portable
toilets stood up and said "I think it's bloody
marvelous" (according to Moore), and began applauding. The other
advertisers joined in, and Hadid gained a moment in the building-trade
spotlight.
As clients became more and more fascinated with Hadid's plans, some
of the plans advanced from theory to reality. She designed the unique
Bergisel Ski Jump on a mountain near Innsbruck, Austria, and a parking
garage and transit station in suburban Strasbourg, France, that later won
the Mies van der Rohe Award from the European Union. In 1998 came the
biggest commission yet: the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for
Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, popularly known as the Contemporary Arts
Center.
Sidewalk Incorporated into Structure
The new building had to fit the confines of a narrow street corner lot in
downtown Cincinnati, but Hadid made a virtue of necessity by linking the
museum's internal and external environments: the outdoor sidewalk
continued into the building, where it propelled visitors toward a sleek
black central staircase that melded dramatically into the
structure's back wall. As viewers ascended the staircase they
looked into galleries that completely overturned the usual neutral
conception of museum display spaces—the galleries had different
shapes and sizes, and each one seemed to present something new to those
approaching. "Not many people voluntarily walk up six stories
anywhere," noted Joseph Giovannini of
Art in America
, "but Hadid's space so intrigues visitors that few think of
bypassing the experience by hitching a ride on the elevator: they sense
they would miss chapters." A bonus in Hadid's design was its
economy: the building used only common materials, and construction costs
came in at a reasonable $230 per square foot.
Hadid's creative fulfillment of a
plum commission raised her
international profile considerably. Where Hadid had sometimes been
considered
abrasive and difficult to work with, now she was hailed as a
pioneer who had stuck to her vision even while facing difficult obstacles.
At times, Hadid ascribed the resistance her ideas encountered to her
gender and ethnicity. She also conceded that her work and personality were
challenging. "I am eccentric, I admit it," she told Moore,
"but I am not a nutcase."
Hadid's next major American commission came from Bartlesville,
Oklahoma, site of the Price Tower designed by legendary American architect
Frank Lloyd Wright. Hadid was hired to design a museum adjoining the
Wright building—a choice that made sense, for Hadid was sometimes
compared to Wright for her futuristic designs and her visionary rethinking
of the relationships between humans and buildings. In 2006 it was one of
Wright's most famous structures, the Guggenheim Museum in New York,
that played host to a major
retrospective of Hadid's work.
Indeed, the links between building and environment, and between building
and user, loomed larger in Hadid's thinking as her fame grew and
commissions poured into her office. "I started out trying to create
buildings that would sparkle like isolated jewels; now I want them to
connect, to form a new kind of landscape, to flow together with
contemporary cities and the lives of their peoples," she told
Glancey. A new factory she designed for German automa-
ker BMW was laid out in such a way that workers and management personnel
crossed paths more frequently.
In 2004 Hadid was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the
profession's highest honor. She was the first woman to receive the
award. In the mid-2000s she finally received a full-scale commission in
the British Isles, for a cancer-care building called Maggie's
Centre in Fife, Scotland. Highly visible Hadid buildings planned or
underway included a bridge in the Persian Gulf state of Abu Dhabi, a movie
theater complex in Barcelona, Spain, and several new museums. Greater
international exposure seemed assured in a project waiting further down
the line: the aquatics building for the 2012 Summer Olympics to be held in
London. And she seemed to be outdoing herself with each successive design.
"Co-curator Monica Montagut quotes Hadid's statement that
'I still believe in the impossible,'" noted Raymund
Ryan in his
Architectural Review
commentary of Hadid's Guggenheim exhibition. "Judging from
this display in New York City, there are few limits to what Hadid might do
next."
