She recently returned for its 20th anniversary. The renegade planet that is Hadid kept hurtling forward, setting up her own London practice and, in 1993, completing her first building – the Vitra Fire Station in Germany. But in a way he was right – I should not have a conventional career and he was absolutely spot on.” “When he said it at the time, I was upset. “I often wonder that myself,” Hadid says with a chuckle, revealing a cheeky gap-toothed smile. “There were new ideas, new materials.”Īt 22 she moved to London to train at the radical Architectural Association, under the tutelage of influential Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, who famously called her “a planet in her own inimitable orbit.” “There was a sense of optimism, we were building a new world that was demolished during the war,” she said. She and her two brothers were sent to boarding school in England, before later gaining a degree in mathematics from the American University of Beirut.Īs a teen she was inspired by a 1960s post-war boom in modernist architecture, when exciting new designs made the cover of Time magazine. Hadid grew up in a Bauhaus-inspired home in Baghdad, her father leader of the Iraqi Progressive Democratic Party, a man who highly valued education. And as a woman you’re excluded from that bonding. “And I’m not privy to that world so much – they go fishing, they go golfing, they go out and have a drink. “I think it’s a boys’ club everywhere,” she says. Read: World’s ‘most exclusive club’ admits womenįrom an outside perspective, Hadid’s determination has paid off, finally cracking the notoriously masculine world of architecture.
I think things have changed in the last 20 years. “But when a woman is ambitious it’s seen as bad. Is there a defiant twinkle in her eye as she recalls the incident? “If you’re a man you’re seen as someone who’s tough and ambitious,” she says. Indeed, when Vienna’s MAK museum had an exhibition of her work in 2003, attendants wore t-shirts emblazoned with Hadid quotes such as, “Would they still call me a diva if I was a man?” It means that you don’t challenge the situation.” “In London it was very timid, people behave well, they’re polite – especially if you’re a woman. I never sat back and said ‘walk all over me, it’s OK,’” she says about her headstrong approach. For detractors, they’re overbearing and over budget.Įither way, there’s no denying Hadid’s phenomenal success, the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize in 2004 – regarded as architecture’s Nobel – and in the last decade going from the architect who never built anything to the architect who built everything. Gaze across the sweeping roof of Hadid’s London Aquatic Centre or the overlapping limbs of Rome’s MAXXI museum, and you get the feeling these fluid forms are not harnessed by gravity at all.įor fans, they’re beguiling creations which redefined architecture for the modern age. Read: The $15m yacht controlled by an iPad. That’s one thing that’s different – architecture is tied to gravity.” “Unfortunately, architecture, as much as we’d like it to float, it doesn’t. “I like this kind of project because every time you do them, you learn about some other type of parameters which you had not always considered. “The idea was that the frames could be like veins,” explained Hadid. So just what goes on in the mind of an architect who has created buildings with the most intriguing shapes? They range from a 128-meter “master prototype” to a 90-meter version called “Jazz.” On the wall behind her, a plasma screen flashes computer-generated images of her six boats, their gleaming exoskeleton frames seamlessly weaving together each luxurious level. Her latest project is for German superyacht builders Blohm+Voss – the same company behind billionaire businessman Roman Abramovich’s “Eclipse,” the second-largest private yacht in the world. The installation is called “City of Towers,” and sitting a little behind this mini metropolis is the creator herself, dressed in a black cloak at a long table of rippling glass. Perhaps the urban legends about her formidable demeanor are part of the mystique that has built up around the 63-year-old Iraqi-born Briton, who today boasts over 400 staff and 950 projects in 44 countries – including plans for Japan’s 2020 Olympic Stadium and the recently opened Serpentine Sackler gallery in London’s Hyde Park.ĭozens of models of Hadid’s distinctive white, sweeping, space-age designs sit on undulating plinths in her gallery in east London’s fashionable Clerkenwell.
0 kommentar(er)
