Six years on from her death, Zaha Hadid’s influence is yet to be fully felt. The British-Iraqi architect and dame, affectionately dubbed ‘The Queen of the Curve’, was only 65 years old when she died of a heart attack, leaving a legacy as incomplete as it is impressive.
Born into a wealthy family in Baghdad in 1950, Hadid’s early life was marked by an almost unobtainable level of privilege. Her father, Mohammed, was a wealthy industrialist and politician who served as Iraq’s minister for finance in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, and her mother, Wajiha, was an artist. Hadid encountered architecture at an early age, first on family holidays to the ancient Sumerian cities in the southern Iraq, and later, aged six, when an architect friend of her father’s “would come to our house with the drawings and models”. Writing for The Guardian in 2012, Hadid recalls: “I remember seeing the model in our living room and it triggered something.”
In the 1960s, Hadid was sent to boarding school in England – a trip familiar to upper-class children throughout the colonial and post-colonial world – before moving to Lebanon to study mathematics at the American University in Beirut. In 1972, she moved to London and began her studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, a strange, doubly named institution, and one of the most prestigious architectural schools in the world.
There, Hadid fell under the tutelage of some of the leading figures of the time, including Rem Koolhass, Bernard Tschumi and Elia Zenghelis, impressing them with her brilliance. Koolhass described Hadid as “a planet in her own orbit” while Zenghelis said she was the most outstanding pupil he ever taught. After graduation, Hadid would go to work for Koolhass and Zenghelis at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, before founding her own firm, Zaha Hadid Architects, in London in 1980.
For as famous as she now is, it’s peculiar to note Zaha Hadid’s designs remained unbuilt for much of her early career. Undeniably talented, Hadid’s reputation was initially earned on the strength of her teaching – she would lecture at the AA, Cambridge, Harvard, and Columbia, to name a few – as well as her architectural drawings and paintings, which were widely published in journals at the time. Although she won several major commissions throughout the ‘80s, Hadid’s public breakthrough wouldn’t come until 1988 when she was selected to show drawings and paintings at the exhibition Deconstructivism in Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 1991, Hadid’s vision was finally brought to life in the form of a fire station, part of the Vitra Design Museum in the town of Weil-am-Rhein, Germany. Consisting of a series of intersecting glass and concrete planes, the station represented an ultra-modern interpretation of a wholly utilitarian structure, one more in keeping with the surrounding galleries than any of Weil-am-Rhein’s essential services. While the Vitra Fire Station established a material and visual precedent for several of Hadid’s subsequent projects, such as the Bergisel Ski Jump and Spittelau Housing Project, the hard edges of its concrete form contrast markedly with the sweeping, curvilinear space-age shapes of later projects, serving as a primitive prototype for the graceful, gargantuan creations of the following decades.
This rudimentary form of Hadid’s design language persisted throughout the ‘90s and into the early 2000s, when it began to undergo a transformation with her designs for the Ordrupgaard Museum and BMW Administration Centre. Both designs took the basic oblong shape that Hadid was so fond of, and bent it, rounding the edges and softening the building’s profile to create a new, fluid form disconnected from the legacy of linear, modernist architecture in a way that her previous works were not.
In 2004, despite having completed only four buildings, Hadid was awarded the Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious commendation in architecture. The prize was an accelerant on an already burgeoning career and marked a shift in Hadid’s design style as she engaged in some of her most ambitious projects of the 21st century. Buildings like the Guangzhou Opera House served as the proof-of-concept for a flowing, highly futuristic style that would establish Hadid as a public works extraordinaire and architect on a truly global scale. With the completion of the London Aquatic Centre ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games, the Queen of Curves left her inimitable signature on the city she called home.
Throughout human history, our architecture has often served as the truest reflection of ourselves. From sacred temples to stately homes and towering, prideful skyscrapers, the things we build frequently tell us more about the societies that created them than the stories they leave behind. The buildings Zaha Hadid leaves behind tell the story of our culture too: globally connected, grandiose and shamelessly capitalistic, but also adaptable, everchanging and eternally hopeful.
Zaha Hadid not only imagined the future, she built it in a way that no other modern architect has yet managed, and to look at one of her buildings is to be awed and motivated by the brilliance of the human mind. As with all great architecture, her work is a legacy of who we are as humans and of what we can achieve, and will continue to tell that story long after we are gone.
