Zaha Hadid: from Britain to Baghdad

When Zaha Hadid died in March, she left behind the fastest growing architectural practice in Britain. “It is impossible to say how much we have all been affected by Zaha’s death,” says Patrik Schumacher, senior partner of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) as well as her long-time friend and collaborator. “Zaha was… Zaha. Irrepressible, a force of nature. But her work — our work — carries on.”

Indeed it does. Until late November, the Palazzo Franchetti in Venice, a compelling attraction in its own right, is also home to an exhibition devoted to ZHA. There are imaginative models for buildings, furniture and products – many still prototypes — in plastic, resin, polymers, folded paper and even pure gold. More than a few resemble jewellery.

Wall-to-ceiling colour photographs show the firm’s largest building projects, among them Beijing International Airport’s vast new Terminal 1, due for completion in 2018. Also on display are paintings dating from the early eighties, offset by pure white scale-models of skyscrapers. One, fluid in form, represents the Central Bank of Iraq, planned for Baghdad, where Zaha was born in 1950. It is architecture as homecoming, and in such style.

This is not an art exhibition, but a mesmerising inventory of architectural forms that have been morphed over the past 30 years into radical, yet perfectly real, buildings in, to date, 44 countries. These exhibits are also tools forged through an unrelenting process of research, development and experimentation that has characterised ZHA since it was established in London in 1979.

Days after seeing the exhibition, I meet Patrik in the cafe of the Architectural Association School in Bedford Square, London. This is where, in the early eighties, I first encountered Zaha’s dramatic paintings, and the architect herself. It was obvious then that while the AA — under the radical chairmanship of Alvin Boyarsky — did much to nurture Zaha’s embryonic talent, her style was barely restrained by the polite Georgian setting of Bedford Square.

“When I joined Zaha in 1988,” says Patrik, “there were just a few of us. We completed our first building in 1993” — a fire station for Vitra, the German furniture maker, at Weil am Rhein — “and since grew to 400 architects. Now we have offices in London, New York, Mexico City, Dubai, Beijing and Hong Kong.”

Until Zaha’s sudden death, at the age of 65, ZHA had completed 55 projects worldwide. They now have a further 45 buildings on the go. Despite the radical nature of its work, Patrik sees no reason why the firm’s pace should slow down. “We continue to move forward,” he says. “In the nineties, we shaped collisions of fragmented architectural forms into buildings. Today, our work offers a fluid complexity and whatever we come up with as a final form for a building, we can build. The form of our work will continue to change as Zaha has always wanted. There is no house style we have to follow.”

It seems absurd today to think that ZHA’s competition-winning design of the mid-nineties, for what was to be the Cardiff Bay Opera House, was undermined by willfully philistine placemen and politicians, who described it as unbuildable. Compared to the galaxy of daring designs ZHA has completed since, the opera house was little more, in structural terms, than a stroll along a beach. There is no question, though, that Zaha herself was under attack, then as now, not so much for being a woman in what was a man’s world, or even a foreigner (an exotic one at that), but for operating with increasing success outside the mainstream of prevailing British architectural culture.

Zaha did not design polite, biscuit-box buildings arranged in neat, straight lines. Not for Vitra, BMW or the city of Wolfsburg — the three German clients that, along with Rome’s long-gestating MAXXI museum and Cincinnati’s ingenious Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, all commissioned her firm in the final decade of the 20th century.

These commissions were the true launch pad for Zaha’s stellar career. They were also controversial, especially among those who prefer what architects call ‘orthogonal’ buildings — those that, because they appear strait-laced and no-nonsense, are assumed to be functional. “Some critics see our work as willful and not functional,” says Patrik.

“But orthogonal design is not always functional. In fact, it restricts solutions. Orthogonal boxes do not respond to irregular sites, for example, while because they are based on a rigid grid, often they are not responsive inside.

Continously reinventing
Wherever you look, whatever you do, everything is the same. More fluidly planned buildings encourage more complex social spaces and allow a great variety of work spaces.” Following Zaha’s death, will ZHA’s buildings continue to be as daring as they have been? “Our own people wouldn’t stand for run-of-the-mill design,” Patrik says. “So, we will continue to invent and reinvent, although, as Mies van der Rohe said, you don’t reinvent architecture every Monday morning. We are moving on to even more open-ended and unpredictable forms of architecture. We just have to look at the endless forms of nature — there is never just one solution.”  

In Salerno, on the Italian coast south of Naples, I visit the new, ZHA-designed maritime terminal. Inspired, perhaps, by natural forms — oyster shells, turtle shells — it is both striking and almost ruthlessly functional. Constructed in raw concrete picked out in striations of aluminium and LED lighting it will, in months to come, guide passengers and their luggage smoothly up to and down from ships berthed alongside.

Passengers will promenade along gently rising and falling ramps that twist and turn inside the building to spectacular visual effect. This, though, is an eminently logical move, controlling the speed at which the influx of passengers moves. With no stairs to navigate, all is a seamless flow, the building informed by spatial currents and confluences rather than corridors and stairwells.

“This is an elemental building,” says Gaetano Di Maio, the highly experienced engineer, builder and director of works for the Terminal project guiding me around the, as yet, empty building. “But, everything you see here is on the limit, architecturally and technically. It’s been a demanding building, a challenge for me every day. Look at that ramp, how it’s cantilevered so far over the entrance hall with no apparent support… that’s not easy to do.”

For a moment, I think Gaetano is on the attack. Architects, eh? But, then he walks me out into the blistering sun to look at the prognathous concrete bridge that will lead passengers to ships. This frames calculated views of, from one side, a dark blue sea and azure sky and, on the other, the skyline of Salerno itself climbing vertiginously up a rock face. “Beautiful,” Gaetano says. “This is a beautiful building.”

And so it is, despite an interior free of the slightest hint of comforting decor. Bands of windows, however, act like frescoes, capturing views of a city crowned with a Byzantine castle, fringed with streets of immense character and hemmed with a sweeping tree-lined promenade, all bright blossom in June. Despite its sophisticated geometries and parametric computer wizardry, Zaha’s terminal seems to have washed up on Salerno’s shore as if always destined to arrive here.

A similar marriage of rigorous yet richly enjoyable geometry and natural forms will soon be played out in London’s Science Museum. ZHA’s work, although its future appears assured overseas, remains a rarity on home shores. The new Mathematics Gallery, due to open in December, promises to be a gem, its seemingly flamboyant forms determined by the pattern of airflows that would have been generated around the wings and fuselage of the Handley Page HP 39 biplane hanging from the ceiling. An experimental short take-off and landing aircraft built to take part in the 1929 Guggenheim Safe Aircraft Competition, this inventive machine could maintain level flight at just 30mph. The mathematics and daring of its functional design have inspired an altogether new architectural experience.

“I know from my experience,” Zaha told the Serpentine Gallery’s Hans Ulrich-Obrist in 2011, “that without research and experimentation not much can be discovered. With experimentation, you think you’re going to find out about one thing, but you actually discover something else. That’s what I think is really exciting. You discover much more than you bargain for.”

Zaha’s first building was a fire station. The next ZHA project to be completed will be the Port Authority Building in Antwerp. Here, a surreal boat-like superstructure, containing offices, straddles the 1922 vintage Hansa House designed by the Belgian Emiel Van Averbeke as a fire station. From those earliest exhibitions of her work at the Architectural Association, Zaha Hadid set the architectural world alight. Even in death, her flame burns brightly, if as controversially as ever. She created challenging and often wonderful things. A buoyant, multi-authored ZHA is unlikely to let that flame burn out.