Building the impossible

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THE POWER DIET
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I
POWER MAVAJUCK
Nicholas Fox Weber dares
to meet the ferocious genius
behind some of today's
most original and extraordinary
works of architecture.
Portrait by Irving Penn.
had heard Zaha Hadid was ferocious. Just before the
architect's Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati opened to ovations last
year- 1J1e New York Times called it "the most important American building to be completed since the end
of the Cold War"- the crew installing a concwTent exhibition of her work were made miserable when Hadid
decided things were not going the way she wanted; her
behavior, [ was told, ranged from little-girl petulance to
out-and-out rants. Another Hadid classic came from
an interpreter who had recently worked on the architect's negotiations with a group of Japanese businessmen hoping to commission several shopping malls.
While !Uing her nails, Haclid had belligerently refi.lsed to make even one
suggested design change, causing the normally polite visitors from
Tokyo to use a word for her that the interpreter discreetly declined to
translate. And then there was the architect in Gc1many who described
working for Hadid as a "fo1m of masochism," adding that he had once
seen her publicly shout at an assistant architect that be should look at
himself in the mirror and only return in an Armani suit. Although HaSHEER INTENSITY did has endless requests to take on new work, sit on juries,
Hadid's work, says and give lectures- and is perennially rumored to be the
her friend Donna
next Pritzker Architecture Prize win ner- her cultural
celebrity has come about not only from the brilliance of
Karan, "has a
her buildings but from the fascinating example she sets as a
strength and
a seduction to itthe way she does."
517
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woman whose strong will and acid tongue rival the strength of
her creations. At a recent retrospective ofher work in Vietma,
where some 2,000 people showed up for the opening, attendants
handed out T-shirts emblazoned with one ofher more famous
pronouncements: WOULD THEY CALL ME A DIVA lF I WERE A GUY?
From the outset, I expected trouble. Advised that Hadid was
unlikely to focus on our conversation in the office, l asked to talk
with her staiT and then have lunch with her alone. Her assistant
eventually worked out a time when I coul d visit Hadid's
workshojrlike London headquruters, which are housed in a lru·ge
Victorian building in Clerkenwell, a disttict of design ftrms and
rutists' studios. I would meet at 12:30 with some project architects-Hadid has a staff of 60-and then head for lunch at l :30
with the boss herself.
t the appointed hour, I began with the subalterns. But as 2:00P.M. approached Hadid still had not appeared in what was referred to as the media and press center. I
was informed that she was just ru·ound the
corner, in a large room where rows of
draftsmen were at work, but was not yet
ready to meet.
Fifteen minutes
later, now almost
an hour behind,
I announced that
1would ftnd her myself and headed disobediently into the main office.
Sitting on the edge ofa drafting table,
Hadid had a mobile phone buried in
her lap and could not be bothered to
look up from its screen when I tried to
i ntrod uce myself. Her prese nce
nonetheless was substantial. Because
ofthe way she was bent over the phone,
what I fu·st took in were her thick mane
ofdru·k hair- its reddish-blonde streaks
askew-ru1d her bare legs dangling off
the table. She is a large woman, and there was something arresting about the way her feet were squeezed into a pair of pointed, spike-heeled gold pumps (designed, she later told me, by her
friend Donna Kru·an). Those audaciously delicate suppo1ts for
the mass above reflected the same sort ofgravity-defYing bravura she achieves in her buildings. But in general her appearance
was so baroque that her total look was as hard to pin down as the
elements of her architecture-especially because 1 could not see
her face. Still without raising her head, she was shouting to her
personal assistant-safely at the other end of the room-"ridiculous!" and "Are you stupid?," offering me a rather sweet "sony"
before resuming the blasts. The issue, apparently, was coffee.
She had asked for a decaf espresso. Others had their Starbucks
cups-where was hers? She looked annoyed with everything. Finally, she ordered her P.A. to atTange for her driver to take us to
the restaurant she had chosen for our lunch, if indeed we could
still get served at nearly 3:00P.M., which she doubted.
As we finally climbed into her car and set off for the Real
Greek, a local canteen, I prepru·ed myself for battle. Two hours
later, still sitting across from Hadid, 1 had the most stunning
surprise yet as the architect suddenly shifted into being one
of the most beguiling, good-humored, patient, and truly
generous-spirited people I ever met. Just as our wide-rangi.J1
and animated conversation led me to a more nuanced under
standing of her work, so did the experience of observing th
opposite extremes ofHadid's many-sided personality. "Zaha'
funny, chruming, and strong," as Donna Kru·ru1 says. "All thes
things are mirrored in her work, but if she weren't feisty, she
wouldn't be able to make the kinds of designs she does."
Zaha Hadid's buildings cascade in vibrant rhythms and
seem to have been built from the inside out. Distinguished co].
leagues call the 53-year-old dynamo "an utter genius with
space"; her sprawling art centers and space-age office buildings realize in unprecedented form the dream put into twentieth-century architecture by Le Corbusier, with his ideal of
structures without facades whose life grows from their inner
pulse and multiple functions. No two of Hadid's designs are
the same; the architect has no trademark "style" or cookiecutter mold to stamp out matching clones. When people reach
for a label to apply to her buildings, they can only falter. She
might be compared to Frank Gehry for the sheer daring and
originality of the work, but its look is hers alone. If one were
to insist on a school to describe Hadid's designs, the most apt
might be 3-D Functional Suprematism: Essentially, Hadid has
borrowed certain fmms and attitudes
from the works of early Russian
abstract artists- Malevich and El
Lissitzky, in particular-and reapplied
them to architecture, as if the paint
on the cruwas has been freed to burst
into multidimensional life.
Hadid's Vitra Fire Station, located
on the grounds of the design company's complex in Germany, lunges at1d
soars with the crisp decisiveness of an
amalgam of icicles and glass shards.
The nerve center of BMW's new industrial complex, scheduled to open
this spring in Leipzig, undulates like
the assembly line nearby and invokes
the energy and optimism that have replaced the languor of that former East German city. The roof
of her u·am station in Strasbow-g, like a gigantic geometric sombrero, redefines the idea of cantilever. Her ski jump in Innsbruck, AustJia, is a mix of rocket launch and roller coaster, sure
to make athletes fiy faster. And the art center in Cincinnati resembles sound speakers in a concert hall, multifaceted cubic
units that project in every direction at once. The building bas
justly received accolades as a totally original approach to a complex program of exhibition and event spaces. The work jolts
you, but in a pleasant, uplifting way. lt wakes you up with the
sense that there are always new possibilities and unexpected
solutions. Along with an even larger arts center in Rome, now
in the process of being designed, this amazing panoply offmms
has unrivaled architectural panache.
The beginnings ofHadid's breathtaking inventiveness can be
found in her childhood in Iraq. Twenty-tlu·ee years have passed
since she was last in Baghdad, where she was born in 1950, but
the memories loomlru·ge. Her pru·ents were botl1 from powerful
Muslim families. "My father was a real modernist," Hadid says
ofa time in Iraq when the country's pru·liamentary-style government was beginning to crumble. " He believed in indusu·y as a
way ofliberatinglraq." Having gone to the London School of
Hadid has a
reputation for being
able to hold
her own and more:
"I never explode in
public .... I explo de
all the time"
520
BUILDING THE IMPOSSIBLE
(continued from page 521)
Karan is one of those people. The first
time the designer saw something by Hadid- it was a rippling, sway-backed sofa
that provides seating on two opposite
sides- she was flabbergasted by its revelation of structure and sculptural force.
Karan became ecstatic. "I asked, 'Who
did this?' It looks so much like me. All her
work is my aesthetic, an out-of-the-box
kind of thinking. It's sensual. It's strong.
It's all about the body. Il has a strength
and a seduction to it- the way she does."
Karan has H adid's furniture both at
home and in her stores. The designer puts
Hadid on a pedestal-and not just one
made of her own gold shoes: "If I had to
name some of my iconic women, she's
definitely among the top ten. She's a powerful, sexy woman."
For a long time, H adid herself could
not see why she had that sort of heroic
stature. " Fifteen years ago someone told
me that for a lot of young architects I was
a role model," she says." I didn' t understand it. But now I am beginning to. Architecture is not an easy profession for
women to deal with. It's not easy to stick
it out. A lot of people think the route to
success is to give up your principles and
ideas. They pressure you to compromise
and accept mediocrity. If you're not like
that, people think you' re diffi cult." I
laughed and said I had heard that she
sometimes let loose in public. This
prompted the self-contradictory response: "I never explode in public .. .. I
explode all the time." Smiling, she added,
" I can behave terribly, but I do it with a
sense of humor." o