Art

Read the Design Museum’s Zaha Hadid exhibition blog

Have you ever imagined what the buildings of the future will look like? Sure, there’ll be the customary components – rooms, walls, floors, windows and doors – but will they be recognisable as such? There might not be any right angles at all; ceilings could be enormous, curving sun roofs that control the temperature inside by reacting to sunlight and dilating like enormous eyes.
Feature continues

The city itself might one day become a constantly shifting tessellation of interchangeable forms, networks and lines, mirroring our fast-paced, information-ready lifestyles. It is doubtful that you will have ever seen a Zaha Hadid building, let alone been in one, but as one of the world’s leading architects (and the only woman in that select bunch), she is transforming this seemingly radical vision of architecture into reality rather than ‘Brave New World’-style science fiction.

Behind the façade of an old red-brick Clerkenwell school, her firm’s offices are white and razor-sharp, with trademark Hadid swooshes instead of door handles and barely a flat surface on which to perch a glass of water. A voice comes booming out of the office-wide intercom like an omnipresent force: ‘Woody, could you get me the plans for the Design Museum exhibition?’

Another door opens and the explosive designs appear almost instantaneously.

‘Where’s Woody?’ asks Zaha Almighty.

‘He’s on holiday,’ says this other person, one of many employees who buzz in and out of the capacious boardroom with its soaring polystyrene sculptures and furniture designs.

‘Hmm,’ wonders Hadid. It’s no wonder she struggles to keep up with her staff’s whereabouts, because she now has around 200 people working for her on 40 projects currently underway worldwide, which will add to her tally of 15 or so structures already in existence. Hadid lore has it that she is a fearsome, espresso-chugging, chain-smoking creature dressed in black, who screams unreasonable orders and unworkable demands in pursuit of architectural perfection. The truth is somewhat different as the now-reformed smoker sits dressed in shimmering metallic green, sipping jasmine tea and rationally discussing her career so far, an overview of which will form the Design Museum retrospective.

‘I can’t say I’m an easygoing person, but some of my staff have been with me for 20 years and they know I’m half-kidding. I’m sure I am terrible, but if you want to do this kind of work extremely well, you have to make people do it in a certain way.’

The 56-year-old, Iraqi-born Londoner has had to contend with more than just pressure from clients and contractors, largely as she doesn’t fit into the predominantly white male architects’ club. ‘I only find this prejudice here. It’s not in Europe. In the Arab world it’s different because they’re so proud of anyone doing well. In Iraq, many of my female friends were architects and professionals with a lot of power during the 1980s while all the men were at war in Iran.’

Hadid grew up in Baghdad and was schooled by nuns before leaving to pay her dues at the Architectural Association and at Rem Koolhaas’s office in London, and then setting up on her own in 1980. Less than 25 years later, Hadid was awarded the Pritzker Prize, considered the Nobel Prize for architecture, beating Richard Rogers – a previous recipient and one of Britain’s most famous architects – to the highest accolade in their field. Perhaps even more surprising than this is that Hadid is the last of her generation to have anything completed in her adopted home town, having built only two temporary constructions in the capital: the snaking layers of the Mind Zone at the hapless Millennium Dome; and the Serpentine Gallery’s first summer pavilion in 2000 (she has just been commissioned to design another temporary installation for the Serpentine, which will go on show in July).

‘I think it’s very strange; nobody can really explain why. I know this city so well because I have travelled back and forth taking every route from west to east for the past 20 years. Maybe they think my work is too fantastic.’

Derogatory tags such as ‘fantasist’ and ‘paper architect’ were often applied to Hadid in the early days due to her conspicuous lack of built work, but ironically they might be appropriate terms for an architect who paints, scribbles or draws her ideas before they are rendered by computer. ‘The paintings were always part of the building,’ she says of some of the works to be included in her Design Museum exhibition.

‘They were never done as pure art.’ Hadid differs in this hands-on approach from many of the current crop of techno-architects who are only a few steps away from relinquishing all human control and ushering in an age of computer-generated architecture. But stories about her passing images across a photocopier to come up with her extraordinary sweeping, stretching designs are false; it is technology that has had to catch up with Hadid and not the other way round.

The sinuous lines and layers may look spectacular but her architecture is always built with its end users – us – in mind. ‘We learn from our own repertoire, but every site brings something unique to the project. Our approach is to invest in making a space, and research how, for example, to integrate civic space within the domain of office space.’

The distinction between street and structure is often blurred in a Hadid design: a transparent glass sheet is sometimes all that prevents interior spilling into exterior and vice versa. This seamless entranceway, dubbed the ‘urban carpet’, has been used effectively, first in the Mind Zone and then at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Centre and the MAXXI Contemporary Art and Architecture Centre, which is nearing completion in Rome. ‘The idea of the urban carpet is to draw people in. It works because it pulls you into the building and then pulls you back into the city. It’s a geometric game or an investigation into the way you can manipulate and move people to a building.’

Having broken down all these barriers – between inside and outside, between male and female architects, between the Arab world and the West – the race is finally on to see which of her five forthcoming London projects will be finished first. It could be a gallery and apartment block on Hoxton Square, the new headquarters of the Architecture Foundation (which is scheduled to open next year) or a brand-new city academy for Lambeth (due to be ready in 2009). ‘Education, housing and hospitals are the most important things for society. If you go back to Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre [Hadid’s first UK building, in Kirkcaldy], it was a small project but it created a space that would make people feel good and allow them to wander off and think.’

The most high-profile of the capital’s Hadids-in-progress is the Olympic Aquatic Centre, which has already been embroiled in the larger row over the escalating costs of the games. The Department of Culture had to apologise after Tessa Jowell incorrectly suggested that the budget for the swimming pool complex had doubled due to changes in the proposals. ‘I think that most projects of that scale have a very large team with many consultants and a complex system of monitoring. So far, you know, it’s fine. I think we work well with the clients.’

If Hadid sounds diplomatic, it’s because she’s had other major schemes vetoed at the last minute – never more painfully than in 1996 when her winning design for Cardiff Bay Opera House was abandoned, her own urban carpet being pulled dramatically from under her feet. The decision to blackball the £86 million design was, Hadid wrote at the time, ‘a tragedy for the people of Wales’ and ‘a triumph for petty-mindedness’.

The Sun newspaper ran a hate campaign and First Secretary of the Welsh Assembly Rhodri Morgan likened her design to a heretical version of the Ka’bah in Mecca, believing that a fatwa would descend upon Cardiff. ‘Of course it was unpleasant,’ she says in hindsight, ‘but it was also an important experience. After Cardiff, maybe until 1999, was like the dark ages for us. Honestly, we did not stop and I produced some of my best work then. I think that by defying the rules in that early period we changed the way people perceived architecture.’

In addition to her architecture, Hadid’s furniture and interior designs have become much sought after. She recently created a range of long, swooping, moulded sofas and space-age shelving units called Dune Formations for gallery owner David Gill in London. While the sandy shapes have obvious resonance with the deserts of Sumerian Iraq that she experienced as a child, the shelves are so big that they would not fit in the average airport lounge. One of Hadid’s own sofas only made it into her apartment with 20 centimetres to spare. Her latest piece of ‘sculpitecture’ is Mobile Art, an itinerant contemporary art space commissioned by Karl Lagerfeld and Chanel, which will land like a gleaming white UFO in Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, London and Paris between 2008 and 2010.

So, with all this new-found exposure and financial clout, what would Hadid do to London if she were given free rein? ‘I’m curious myself because there are so many strange places here, so many lost triangles,’ she says. ‘I think a lot of the things done in the ’80s in the name of historicism should be scrapped, but I like that London changes organically.’

Although her style is synonymous with a chaotic fragmentation that suits London’s erratic map, Hadid can be holistic. In her Leipzig BMW plant (shortlisted for the 2005 Stirling Prize), for example, she integrated a conveyor-belt so that the 5,000 employees could see the unfinished cars circulating the building while they were walking to their office or having a coffee, creating a building that pulses and processes like a body rather than an assembly line. The future of architecture depends on discovering technologies and materials that promote harmony with the natural world, to which Hadid says: ‘I think, you know, open the door and there could be other ways of doing things.’

Presumably, the door will need redesigning first. Let’s hope the rest of us recognise it when she’s done.

‘Zaha Hadid Architecture and Design’ is at the Design Museum from June 29 (www.designmuseum.org).

Read the Design Museum’s Zaha Hadid exhibition blog