Baghdad-born British architect Zaha Hadid has created spectacular buildings all over the world, including many completed and soon-to-be completed projects across the UAE and the Middle East. While she has made London her home for the past 30 years, she still draws creative inspiration from Arabic culture and the marshes of southern Iraq, where she spent her childhood holidays. Regarded as one of the world's great contemporary architects, her work has been awarded many times internationally but her achievements in the male-dominated profession were formally recognised in 2004, when she was awarded the Pritzker Prize, the highest award in architecture.
Hadid grew up in a privileged family in the Iraq of the 1950s. Her father was a forward-looking man with cosmopolitan interests. "In those days, Baghdad was influenced by Modernism and favoured progressive thinking," she remembers, "Frank Lloyd Wright and Gio Ponti had designed buildings for the city — it was a very forward-thinking place back then. Social reform was a priority."
Hadid's formative years were spent with her family in one of Baghdad's first Bauhaus-inspired houses, where mixed with the more traditional objects were designer pieces made in unusual angles. "I remember an asymmetrical mirror in the living room. I think that was the beginning of my love for unusual shapes," she says.
Raised as a Muslim, Hadid went to a Catholic girls' school, where the nuns who taught science were all from the Baghdad University. "The standard of education in Iraq and the camaraderie between students were incredible," she recalls. "In my class there were girls of different religions — Muslims, Christians, Jews — but that had no influence on our personal relationships."
Although Hadid knew she wanted to be an architect since she was 11 or 12, she studied mathematics at the American University in Beirut — she felt self-conscious about the prospect of being the only woman in the architecture and engineering departments. "Maths and architecture are directly related," she explains, "but my love of creating buildings won out." She moved to London in the early 1970s to study at the Architectural Association School of Architecture under the guidance of her mentors Rem Koollhass and Elia Zenghelis.
A fascination with creating an urban landscape has been in Hadid's blood ever since she visited the southern Iraqi area of Sumer — a place where architecture itself began and the first cities were built millennia ago — and explored the villages, which seem to float on the marshes. "I went there with my father by reed boat as a teenager and was amazed," she says. "The beauty of the landscape — where people, land, water, sky and nature all flowed together — has never left me." It is a landscape that still inspires her.
Through her buildings and urban projects, she hopes to express this interconnection in nature. "I initially wanted to make buildings that sparkled like jewels but now, as I get older, I want them to interconnect, to form a new kind of landscape, to flow together within contemporary cities and the lives of the people who live there."
Her project for the Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre is a good example. It has been inspired by growth in the natural world. Comprising five theatres and performing spaces, the components of this biological analogy — branches, stems, fruits and leaves — are transformed from abstract diagrams into architectonic components, all set against the backdrop of water.
Formally, there are no references to her Islamic cultural roots in her work but she admits that her fascination with the fluidity of Arabic calligraphy and mathematics has inspired her. In her London studio there has been great interest in the concepts of fragmentation, which relate a lot to Islamic art and science in terms of algebra, geometry and mathematics. "I was fascinated with geometry," Hadid explains. "There is a strong connection between the logic of maths and architecture. This is even more evident today, with the use of advanced computer scripts to help create designs." Though Hadid was working on complex structures even in the 1970s, she recognises that computers deal with architectural and engineering problems in a more efficient way. "It advances the maths enormously and there is more precision," she says. Today, computers are an important tool in her London studio and were invaluable when she was designing the sinuous arches of the soon-to-be-completed Shaikh Zayed Bridge in Abu Dhabi.
Other than the studio, she loves cinema and has allowed elements of that passion to influence her. She is fascinated by how movement can affect architecture — as in the frames of a film — and how cinema presents the world from various perspectives. "The way we see things today is never fixed," she says. "The concept of fragmentation and abstraction, which are often used in films, are central to my work in deconstructing repetitiveness and mass production."
Her buildings rarely incorporate right angles in their design. Hadid argues that with 360 degrees to choose from, why use just one? She elaborates by explaining that nature is not uniform or grid-patterned and that the organic randomness of nature is beautiful and inspirational. "Most cities today are multilayered and homogenised. When you realise that, it changes the way you impose buildings on particular sites," she adds.
Hadid's creativity has also manifested itself in interior, fashion, furniture and wallpaper design but she is still the world's only well-known woman architect. She admits that working in the profession requires 100 per cent dedication and that work must "be your life". "This isn't a job where you can dip in and dip out," she says. "When women have babies and need to take a break, it becomes difficult for them to reconnect on the big scale." Working in architecture has been a struggle and one where she has had to dig her heels in and persevere. She says there is still a whole world in business that women have little or no access to and that she still faces resistance. "It's made me sharp, tougher and more precise," she says. It is a result of this, she believes, that her buildings have a raw, vital, earthy quality. She hates the word "nice" and hopes her work is never put into that banal category. "You don't need to make concrete perfectly smooth or paint it or polish it," she explains. "I work a lot with the play of light on surfaces and sometimes the effects are harsh and very dramatic."
Today her works dot the globe. In the United Kingdom, she will be remembered for a number of projects but perhaps best for the Aquatics Centre at the site of the 2012 London Olympics. Inspired by the geometry of water in motion, the mammoth undulated roof structure will be one of the most impressive at the 2012 Olympic Games.
The Middle East has embraced her style but, much as Hadid wants to build in cities such as Beirut and Baghdad, where some of her projects have been accepted, she realises this is hardly the right time. She says she would love to build schools and hospitals, and develop whole areas in Middle Eastern cities and that she strongly believes that imaginative architecture and urban spaces can make a difference in people's lives.
Hadid has clear ideas about where modern cities should be headed and stresses that we must move away from the urbanism of Henry Ford's industrial mass-production society towards creating polycentric cities that match our new digital society. She believes that hybrid-mixed buildings will become very important in the future and that authorities should shun the concept of areas zoned for specific uses, such as housing, entertainment and work. "Layering all these activities in one area can completely change the way we use and view cities," she explains. "Civic buildings which bring people together ultimately eliminate segregation and create harmony." Such a project has been planned for Dubai in the form of the Signature Towers, which will incorporate residences, hotels, offices, shops and leisure facilities, all under one roof.
Hadid does not merely design buildings, she reimagines domestic, corporate and public space. In her breathtakingly sensuous designs, prosaic elements such as the walls and the ceilings, indoors and outdoors, cease to be. All are swept into the mighty curve, which seems to grow organically out of the landscape. The spine-tingling results are a brazen vision of the future.
Scott Adams is a writer based in Madrid.
