Could “timelessness” be overrated?

The architecture of Zaha Hadid is highly divisive. The Baghdad-born, London-based designer neither minced words nor suffered fools, and was most especially displeased when she received praise for being the “first” and “only” woman in many career camps.

She was, in a word, unapologetic. Perhaps Hadid was unconcerned with the tedium of eternity, preferring to create shock-waves with structures made for the here and now. 

Architecture critic Aaron Betsky described Hadid’s work in cinematic terms in the introduction to the book, The Complete Zaha Hadid (Thames & Hudson). He wrote, “She sees like a camera. She perceives the city in slow motion, in pans, swoops and close-ups, in jump-cuts and narrative rhythms.”

For eons, great civilizations built their pyramids and pillars based on the belief that they, along with the culture that made them, would last forever.  By contrast, Hadid’s highly sculptural buildings appear restless and impatient, perhaps reflecting the psyche of their creator. Their undulating contours seem to yearn for flight, and indeed, some resemble alien crafts that have just touched down from another galaxy. 

Among her best-known structures: the London Olympic Aquatic Centre built for the 2012 Olympics, a daylight-filled structure inspired by a swimmer doing the butterfly stroke, and the Guangzhou Opera House, built to suggest two enormous pebbles on the banks of the Pearl River. These projects, like most of the work undertaken by the caffeine-loving, chain-smoking “Queen of the Curve” as she was called, ruffled feathers and caused dissent from the initial sketches – her exquisitely detailed watercolor building plans are now exhibited as art -- to opening day. Objections from British architects, whom Hadid singled out as the most repressively misogynistic on earth, forced Hadid to scale back the structure in order to proceed with the building.

She remarked to the UK’s The Independent in 2016, “Because I’m ‘flamboyant’, I’ve always been seen as difficult. As a woman in architecture, you’re always an outsider. It’s OK, I like being on the edge.” 

This status was nothing new to Hadid. Raised in an aristocratic family, she refused to wear frilly dresses as a child, and instead hired a seamstress to stitch up patterns she had drawn for herself. Of her parents’ decision to send her to a boarding school in Switzerland, Hadid remarked, “They thought they could turn me into a lady.”

Although she seemed to wave away the accolades with near-annoyance, Hadid’s list of groundbreaking accomplishments cannot be ignored. 

In 2003, she brought her signature boldness to the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, the first American museum designed by a woman.

The following year, she was the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize; in 2010 and 2011 she received the Stirling Prize, a British honor for excellence; in 2014, her Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre on the western coast of the Caspian Sea in Baku, Azerbaijan won the Design Museum Design of the Year Award; and in 2016 she became the first woman to win the RIBA Gold Medal, awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects.

She shrugged off labels as well. Inspired by Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich (creator of the infamous  “Black Square” in 1915) and the Suprematists, her work is both praised and dismissed as aggressive, and for its disconcerting sense of fragmentation and instability.  Differing, contradicting vanishing points make her buildings the antithesis of traditional structures, one of many reasons that she is today classified with architects known as the “deconstructivists.” Hadid’s view on the term was that the world of architecture simply couldn’t find an original way to classify her.

Her buildings are simultaneously powerful and fragile. Just as Malevich had dared the art-viewing public to free themselves “…from the tyranny of objects” a century earlier, Hadid’s radical approach defies conventional notions of space, form, balance, and even gravity itself. 

At the time of her sudden death in 2016 at age 65, her mentor Rem Koolhaas wrote that she was “a planet in her own inimitable orbit.”

Will her floaty, calligraphic buildings stand the test of time? Most likely the work of Zaha Hadid will continue to stir controversy indefinitely, and in this sense, her legacy is assured.

All images courtesy of Unsplash and Wikimedia Commons